What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2012-2143

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.3 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 5.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2012-07-05 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-310

Description

The crypt_des (aka DES-based crypt) function in FreeBSD before 9.0-RELEASE-p2, as used in PHP, PostgreSQL, and other products, does not process the complete cleartext password if this password contains a 0x80 character, which makes it easier for context-dependent attackers to obtain access via an authentication attempt with an initial substring of the intended password, as demonstrated by a Unicode password.

Affected products

• Debian Linux: 6.0
• FreeBSD: through 9.0; 1.0, 1.1, 1.1.5, 1.1.5.1, 2.0, 2.0.5 (+52)
• PHP: before 5.3.14; from 5.4.0 before 5.4.4 — fixed in 5.3.14, 5.4.4
• PostgreSQL: from 8.3 before 8.3.19; from 8.4 before 8.4.12; from 9.0 before 9.0.8; from 9.1 before 9.1.4 — fixed in 8.3.19, 8.4.12, 9.0.8, 9.1.4

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: PHP 5.3.14, 5.4.4; PostgreSQL 8.3.19, 8.4.12, 9.0.8, 9.1.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://git.php.net/?p=php-src.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=aab49e934de1fff046e659cbec46e3d053b41c34
• http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git&a=commit&h=932ded2ed51e8333852e370c7a6dad75d9f236f9
• http://kb.juniper.net/InfoCenter/index?page=content&id=JSA10705
• http://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2012/Sep/msg00004.html
• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2012-June/082258.html
• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2012-June/082292.html
• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2012-June/082294.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-07/msg00003.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-updates/2012-09/msg00102.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-updates/2012-10/msg00013.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-updates/2012-10/msg00024.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-1037.html

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