Skip to content

Home Assistant vulnerable to account takeover via auth_callback login

Moderate severity GitHub Reviewed Published Oct 19, 2023 in home-assistant/core • Updated Nov 4, 2023

Package

pip homeassistant (pip)

Affected versions

>= 0, < 2023.9.0

Patched versions

2023.9.0

Description

Part of the Cure53 security audit of Home Assistant.

The audit team’s analyses confirmed that the redirect_uri and client_id are alterable when logging in. Consequently, the code parameter utilized to fetch the access_token post-authentication will be sent to the URL specified in the aforementioned parameters.

Since an arbitrary URL is permitted and homeassistant.local represents the preferred, default domain likely used and trusted by many users, an attacker could leverage this weakness to manipulate a user and retrieve account access. Notably, this attack strategy is plausible if the victim has exposed their Home Assistant to the Internet, since after acquiring the victim’s access_token, the adversary would need to utilize it directly towards the instance to achieve any pertinent malicious actions.

To achieve this compromise attempt, the attacker must send a link with a redirect_uri that they control to the victim’s own Home Assistant instance. In the eventuality the victim authenticates via the said link, the attacker would obtain code sent to the specified URL in redirect_uri, which can then be leveraged to fetch an access_token.

An attacker could increase the efficacy of this strategy by registering a nearly identical domain to homeassistant.local, which at first glance may appear legitimate and thereby obfuscate any malicious intentions.

Nonetheless, owing to the requirements for victim interaction and Home Assistant instance exposure to the Internet, this severity rating was consequently downgraded to Low.

References

@frenck frenck published to home-assistant/core Oct 19, 2023
Published by the National Vulnerability Database Oct 20, 2023
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Oct 26, 2023
Reviewed Oct 26, 2023
Last updated Nov 4, 2023

Severity

Moderate
4.3
/ 10

CVSS base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
Required
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
Low
Integrity
None
Availability
None
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N

Weaknesses

CVE ID

CVE-2023-41893

GHSA ID

GHSA-qhhj-7hrc-gqj5

Source code

Checking history
See something to contribute? Suggest improvements for this vulnerability.