Multiple Zero-Days in PremiSys IDenticard Access Control System

Tenable Research discovered multiple zero-day vulnerabilities in the PremiSys access control system developed by IDenticard. As of January 9, IDenticard has not released a patch for these vulnerabilities.

Background

Tenable Research has discovered four vulnerabilities in the PremiSys access control system from IDenticard. The PremiSys system can be used to manage door controls and access cards, collect detailed facility data and integrate with video monitoring systems.

According to Tenable’s disclosure timeline, multiple attempts were made to contact the vendor to address these vulnerabilities. The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was notified of these vulnerabilities. As of January 9, the vendor hasn’t responded. The 90-day disclosure period ended on January 3, 2019.

Analysis

The following vulnerabilities have been confirmed in versions 3.1.190 of PremiSys IDenticard. Tenable Research requested access to the latest version to verify the vulnerabilities but received no response.

CVE-2019-3906: Hardcoded Credentials (Admin Access to Service)

The service contains hardcoded credentials (CWE-798) that provide administrator access to the entire service via the PremiSys Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Service endpoint.

Users are not permitted to change these credentials. The only mitigation appears to be to limit traffic to this endpoint, which may or may not have further impact on the availability of the application itself.

These credentials can be used by an attacker to dump contents of the badge system database, modify contents, or other various tasks with unfettered access.

CVE-2019-3907: Weak Hashing/Encryption

User credentials and other sensitive information are stored with a known-weak encryption method (Base64 encoded MD5 hashes - salt + password).

CVE-2019-3908: Hardcoded Password

Identicard backups are stored in an idbak format, which appears to simply be a password protected zip file. The password to unzip the contents is hardcoded into the application ("ID3nt1card").

CVE-2019-3909: Default Database Credentials (Full Access to Service Databases)

The IDenticard service installs with a default database username and password of "PremisysUsr" / "ID3nt1card." There are also instructions for meeting longer password standards by using "ID3nt1cardID3nt1card." Users cannot change this password without sending custom passwords to the vendor directly in order to receive an encrypted variant to use in their configurations. These known credentials can be used by attackers to access the sensitive contents of the databases.

Solution

Because there is no vendor patch, affected users will have to attempt to mitigate these vulnerabilities. Systems like this should never be open to the internet and users should ensure proper network segmentation is in place to isolate this critical system.

Additional information

Visit the Tenable Tech Blog on Medium to read researcher Jimi Sebree’s in-depth story about his work uncovering these vulnerabilities.

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