pgut01@cs.auckland.ac.nz braved the dark, cold unknown with: >From owner-best-of-security@suburbia.net Wed Jan 17 23:16:30 1996 X-Authentication-Warning: suburbia.net: majordom set sender to owner-best-of-security using -f Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 16:14:56 +1300 (NZDT) From: pgut01@cs.auckland.ac.nz Message-Id: <199601180314.QAA19064@cs26.cs.auckland.ac.nz> To: hackmsoft@c2.org, llurch@networking.stanford.edu Subject: BoS: A WfW security curiosity (possibly another security hole) Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com Sender: owner-best-of-security@suburbia.net Errors-to: nobody@mail.uu.net Precedence: bulk Reply-To: nobody@mail.uu.net When WfW is installed, it creates a file in the Windows directory called WFWSYS.CFG. This is a standard Windows password file and may be decrypted with the password "23skidoo" (note that this is lowercase, since it's passed to the .PWL-handling code at a level which bypasses the usual password case smashing. The mangled 32-bit form which is passed to the RC4 key setup routine is { 0x67, 0x6F, 0xE3, 0x81 }). WFWSYS.CFG seems to be mostly identical for the few copies I could get to, and WfW networking won't work without it. Decrypting the file doesn't seem to give anything useful, the string "SYSTEM" and what looks like a few 8 or 16-numbers. I don't know enough about how WfW networking works, but my (very vague) guess is that it contains some sort of cookie to uniquely ID each machine for resource sharing over a network. If it does then it it's (yet another) pretty serious security hole, since it's encrypted with a fixed password and seems to be mostly identical over multiple machines. OTOH it may be something to do with serial numbers so you can't install the same copy of WfW on multiple machines on a LAN. Can anyone shed more light on it? Peter.