OpenAEV's Improper Password Reset Token Management Leads to Unauthenticated Account Takeover and Platform Compromise

OpenAEV is an open source platform allowing organizations to plan, schedule and conduct cyber adversary simulation campaign and tests. Starting in version 1.0.0 and prior to version 2.0.13, OpenAEV's password reset implementation contains multiple security weaknesses that together allow reliable account takeover. The primary issue is that password reset tokens do not expire. Once a token is generated, it remains valid indefinitely, even if significant time has passed or if newer tokens are issued for the same account. This allows an attacker to accumulate valid password reset tokens over time and reuse them at any point in the future to reset a victim’s password. A secondary weakness is that password reset tokens are only 8 digits long. While an 8-digit numeric token provides 100,000,000 possible combinations (which is secure enough), the ability to generate large numbers of valid tokens drastically reduces the required number of attempts to guess a valid password reset token. For example, if an attacker generates 2,000 valid tokens, the brute-force effort is reduced to approximately 50,000 attempts, which is a trivially achievable number of requests for an automated attack. (100 requests per second can mathematically find a valid password reset token in 500 seconds.) By combining these flaws, an attacker can mass-generate valid password reset tokens and then brute-force them efficiently until a match is found, allowing the attacker to reset the victim’s password to a value of their choosing. The original password is not required, and the attack can be performed entirely without authentication. This vulnerability enables full account takeover that leads to platform compromise. An unauthenticated remote attacker can reset the password of any registered user account and gain complete access without authentication. Because user email addresses are exposed to other users by design, a single guessed or observed email address is sufficient to compromise even administrator accounts with non-guessable email addresses. This design flaw results in a reliable and scalable account takeover vulnerability that affects any registered user account in the system. Note: The vulnerability does not require OpenAEV to have the email service configured. The exploit does not depend on the target email address to be a real email address. It just needs to be registered to OpenAEV. Successful exploitation allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to access sensitive data (such as the Findings section of a simulation), modify payloads executed by deployed agents to compromise all hosts where agents are installed (therefore the Scope is changed). Users should upgrade to version 2.0.13 to receive a fix.

The product contains a mechanism for users to recover or change their passwords without knowing the original password, but the mechanism is weak.

An attacker operating through a network path may attempt exploitation without authentication or user interaction. If successful, the issue may bypass an access boundary or take over an account.