

The Type 4 password weaknesses were reported to Cisco on March 12 by security researcher Jens Steube, who's the developer behind the, as well as beta tester Philipp Schmidt. To mitigate the vulnerability, Cisco recommends organizations search for any Type 4 passwords they've generated, and replace them with Type 5 passwords, which Cisco's devices do generate correctly. 'There is no automatic conversion of existing Type 5 passwords to Type 4 passwords after upgrading a device to a Cisco IOS or Cisco IOS XE release that has support for Type 4 passwords,' said Cisco. Some caveats about the vulnerability: Cisco said that Type 4 passwords must have been purposefully generated, because no preexisting passwords on its devices would have been automatically updated. 'No other Cisco IOS or IOS XE features use this algorithm to hash passwords or keys.' Previous versions of IOS and IOS XE used the Type 5 algorithm. 'This approach causes a Type 4 password to be less resilient to brute-force attacks than a Type 5 password of equivalent complexity.' The flaw affects only devices that have been upgraded to versions of IOS or IOS XE that support Type 4 passwords, and only affects those devices' 'enable secret' and 'username secret' commands,' according to the security advisory. 'Due to an implementation issue, the Type 4 password algorithm does not use PBKDF2 and does not use a salt, but instead performs a single iteration of SHA-256 over the user-provided plaintext password,' said the Cisco. The problem stems from Cisco's use of the Type 4 password algorithm in the operating system, and its failure to salt – add random bits to - passwords or use, which randomizes passphrases and adds a salt, thus deriving a cryptographic key that's more difficult to crack. The vulnerability affects recently released versions of the IOS and IOS XE operating system that runs on Cisco routers and switches. The Internet is full of sites that have something like the tool below, tap your ‘encrypted’ password in and it will reveal the Cisco password.Īnonymous: 10 Things We Have Learned In 2013 (click image for larger view and for slideshow) Cisco has released a security bulletin warning that a move to strengthen passwords on some devices resulted in making passwords much easier to crack.
#Decrypt cisco secret 4 password update
TYPE 4 is an update of TYPE 5, and was supposed to salt passwords and apply 1000 iterations of SHA-256.
#Decrypt cisco secret 4 password cracked
Cisco has issued a security advisory intimating that its new password hashing algorithm TYPE 4 is vulnerable,which allows Cisco TYPE 4 encoded hashes to be cracked easily.
