Cloak AES-CTR cipher lacks ciphertext authentication, allowing chosen-plaintext forgery by bit flipping

Summary

Reliance on Obfuscation or Encryption of Security-Relevant Inputs without Integrity Checking vulnerability in danielberkompas cloak allows an attacker with write access to stored ciphertext to make it decrypt to a chosen value via bit flipping.

Cloak.Ciphers.AES.CTR encrypts with AES-256 in CTR mode and stores the key tag, the IV and the ciphertext with no MAC. decrypt/2 checks only the key tag and the minimum length before it returns the plaintext, and Cloak.Ciphers.Deprecated.AES.CTR decrypts the legacy format the same way. CTR is a stream cipher, so a value XORed into the stored ciphertext is XORed into the plaintext at the same offset. An attacker who can write to the encrypted store (for example through SQL injection or a compromised replica) and who knows or can guess a stored plaintext can replace it with any value of the same length. The application receives that value with no error.

This issue affects cloak: from 0.1.0-pre onward.

Proof of concept

1. Encrypt "role=user " with Cloak.Ciphers.AES.CTR.encrypt/2 and a random 32-byte key.
2. Without the key, XOR the last 10 bytes of the result (the ciphertext body) with :crypto.exor("role=user ", "role=admin"). Leave the key tag and the IV unchanged.
3. Call Cloak.Ciphers.AES.CTR.decrypt/2 on the modified value. It returns {:ok, "role=admin"}.

Impact

An attacker who can write to the encrypted store can set encrypted fields with known or guessable contents, such as roles, flags, or fixed-format records, to values of their choice without the key. The application decrypts and trusts the forged value.

Workarounds

Configure the vault with Cloak.Ciphers.AES.GCM as the default cipher and re-encrypt existing values, for example with the cloak.migrate.ecto task from cloak_ecto. Then remove Cloak.Ciphers.AES.CTR and Cloak.Ciphers.Deprecated.AES.CTR from the vault configuration, so that ciphertext in the CTR format is no longer decrypted. AES-GCM authenticates the ciphertext and rejects modified values.