Trac Security Overview

This is just a quick'n'dirty document to help users make informed decisions about the Trac.

Recommendations

• Don't use a password which you use elsewhere. (See: Twitter incident) [FIXME: Find ref.]
• Don't expect the ticket database to be non-corrupt or reliable or persistent.
  • Backup the ticket database and wiki pages regularly! Use snapshots so corruption does not overwrite correct data.

Vulnerabilities

• HTTP without SSL means a passive attacker can see all your traffic (except password on login, see below).
• HTTP without SSL means an active attacker can do anything at all with your account privileges.
• Password reset over HTTP means the attacker knows your password with minimal effort.
• HTTP Auth uses Digest mechanism, which means (if implemented correctly):
  • Attacker cannot learn your password during a login request.
  • The database must store your plaintext password (in order to compute the correct digest). [FIXME: verify.]
    • Anyone with file system read access to the machine also has all passwords.

To Do

• Search for existing Trac security references.
• Verify that plaintext passwords are stored.
• Find Twitter incident ref (the short story is that there were no technical security flaws, but users used the same creds on an "unimportant" service as well as a different critical service, so the attacker could escalate the attack across services.)