[wp-trac] Re: [WordPress Trac] #5367: Wordpress cookie authentication vulnerability

[WordPress Trac]

#5367: Wordpress cookie authentication vulnerability
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 Reporter:  sjmurdoch                |        Owner:  anonymous
     Type:  defect                   |       Status:  new      
 Priority:  normal                   |    Milestone:  2.4      
Component:  Security                 |      Version:  2.3.1    
 Severity:  normal                   |   Resolution:           
 Keywords:  security, password, md5  |  
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Comment (by dougal):

 On the one hand, this is yet another case of "Let's take some generic,
 lame, bad security scenario, slap the name 'WordPress' on it (for no
 apparent reason other than the fact that WP is popular), and release a
 security announcement!" As has already been noted, if an attacker already
 has read access to your database, then you've probably lost the battle,
 regardless of anything else.

 On the other hand, we could definitely stand to improve the security of
 the cookie authentication. Things are the way they are now to make it
 convenient for the user. But it's really hard to provide convenient
 persistent authentication in a secure fashion without some external method
 of security (e.g. SSL). We probably need to provide better support for SSL
 (when it's available), or lose the persistence in most cases. There might
 be situations where we can provide persistence more securely, but probably
 not in all server setups.

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Ticket URL: <http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5367#comment:10>
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