CVE-2021-21424: Prevent user enumeration in authentication mechanisms
May 12, 2021 • Published by Fabien Potencier
Affected versions
Symfony >=2.8.0, <3.4.49 | >= 5.0.0, <5.2.9 versions of the Symfony Security, Security Guard, Security Core, and Security HTTP components are affected by this security issue.
The issue has been fixed in Symfony 3.4.49, 4.4.24, 5.2.9, and 5.3.0 RC1. All other affected minor versions of Symfony won't be patched as they are not maintained anymore.
Description
The ability to enumerate users was possible without relevant permissions due to different exception messages depending on whether the user existed or not. It was also possible to enumerate users by using a timing attack, by comparing time elapsed when authenticating an existing user and authenticating a non-existing user.
We now ensure that 403s are returned whether the user exists or not if the password is invalid or if the user does not exist.
The patch for this issue is available here and here also for branch 3.4.
Credits
I would like to thank James Isaac, Mathias Brodala and Laurent Minguet for reporting the issue and Robin Chalas for fixing the issue.
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Thanks 👍
Could you please confirm the fix has also been implemented for the version 4.4.22 of the component security/symfony-http?
I'm asking because I saw the fix here https://github.com/symfony/security-http/commit/c55a8f70fb2a04cf8ec3263d337abb3f22fc0132 but according to our internal Static Code Analysis (and SCA) tool, this version doesn't fix the CVE.
Thank you in advance!
"security/symfony-http" must be "symfony/security-http"