CWE-257

Storing Passwords in a Recoverable Format

The storage of passwords in a recoverable format makes them subject to password reuse attacks by malicious users. In fact, it should be noted that recoverable encrypted passwords provide no significant benefit over plaintext passwords since they are subject not only to reuse by malicious attackers but also by malicious insiders. If a system administrator can recover a password directly, or use a brute force search on the available information, the administrator can use the password on other accounts.

CVE-2025-27459 (GCVE-0-2025-27459)
Vulnerability from cvelistv5
Published
2025-07-03 11:33
Modified
2025-07-03 13:15
CWE
  • CWE-257 - Storing Passwords in a Recoverable Format
Summary
The VNC application stores its passwords encrypted within the registry but uses DES for encryption. As DES is broken, the original passwords can be recovered.
Impacted products
Show details on NVD website


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Mitigation

Phase: Architecture and Design

Description:

  • Use strong, non-reversible encryption to protect stored passwords.
CAPEC-49: Password Brute Forcing

An adversary tries every possible value for a password until they succeed. A brute force attack, if feasible computationally, will always be successful because it will essentially go through all possible passwords given the alphabet used (lower case letters, upper case letters, numbers, symbols, etc.) and the maximum length of the password.

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