Executive Summary

This vulnerability exists in TREK, a collaborative travel planner, in versions prior to 3.0.18. During the login process, if a user email is missing, the system returns early. However, if the email exists, the backend performs a bcrypt password comparison before returning a 401 Unauthorized response. This causes a significant timing difference—about 370 ms versus 10 ms—between responses for existing and non-existing emails. An attacker can exploit this timing discrepancy to enumerate valid user accounts without any difference in HTTP status codes or response bodies.

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Detection Guidance

This vulnerability can be detected by measuring the response time differences during the login flow when submitting different email addresses.

Specifically, when an email address exists in the database, the backend performs a bcrypt password comparison causing a delay of approximately 370 ms before returning a 401 Unauthorized response. When the email does not exist, the response is returned immediately in about 10 ms.

By sending login requests with various email addresses and measuring the response times, an attacker or tester can identify valid user accounts based on the timing discrepancy.

• Use tools like curl or a custom script to send login requests with different email addresses.
• Measure and compare the response times for each request.
• Example command using curl and time measurement in a Unix shell:
• time curl -X POST -d '{"email":"[email protected]", "password":"any"}' https://your-trek-instance/login
• Repeat with different emails and observe if some responses consistently take significantly longer (~370 ms) than others (~10 ms).

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Mitigation Strategies

The immediate step to mitigate this vulnerability is to upgrade TREK to version 3.0.18 or later, where this timing discrepancy issue has been fixed.

Until the upgrade can be applied, consider implementing uniform response timing for login attempts regardless of whether the user exists or not, to prevent timing-based user enumeration.

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Impact Analysis

The vulnerability allows an attacker to determine which email addresses correspond to valid user accounts by measuring response times during login attempts. This user enumeration can lead to targeted attacks such as phishing, credential stuffing, or brute force attacks against known accounts, potentially compromising user privacy and security.

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Compliance Impact

This vulnerability allows an attacker to enumerate valid user accounts via response timing discrepancies during the login flow.

Such user enumeration can lead to unauthorized disclosure of personal data, which may impact compliance with data protection regulations like GDPR and HIPAA that require protection of personally identifiable information.

However, the CVE description does not explicitly state the compliance impact or any regulatory violations.

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