Homer: Hardcoded Default Admin Password 'sipcapture' With No Forced Change on First Login

Summary

On every fresh Homer deployment using internal authentication, the bootstrap process automatically creates an admin account with the password sipcapture (stored as a legacy SHA-256 hex hash). There is no first-login forced-change mechanism. Any attacker who reaches the login endpoint immediately gains full administrative access.

Details

config/config.go lines 858-861:

// DefaultInternalAuthPasswordHash is the SHA-256 hex digest of the default
// bootstrap password (cleartext: sipcapture).
const DefaultInternalAuthPasswordHash = "883ffc1f37fd0fe542b0fb9740035c4383e7d976c411161d24e62edace280f90"

coordinator/services/auth_bootstrap.go lines 20-71: EnsureBootstrapAdminUser() runs at startup. If no admin user exists, it inserts a row with username=admin, password_hash=DefaultInternalAuthPasswordHash. No force_change, no first_login flag, no expiry is set.

coordinator/services/auth_bootstrap_test.go line 114 confirms the plaintext:

u, err := svc.Authenticate(ctx, "admin", "sipcapture")

passwordhash/password.go lines 36-45: Legacy SHA-256 hex hashes are accepted via legacySHA256HexEqual, so the default credential is functional on any deployment.

PoC

# Authenticate with default credentials — works on any fresh Homer deployment
curl -s -X POST http://<homer-host>/api/v3/auth \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"username":"admin","password":"sipcapture"}'
# Response: {"token":"<admin-jwt>","data":{"userGroup":"admin"}}

# Use the token to access all admin functionality
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer <admin-jwt>" http://<homer-host>/api/v3/users

Impact

Use of Hard-coded Credentials (CWE-798). Any attacker who can reach a freshly deployed Homer instance gains immediate full administrative access using the publicly documented default password, with no lockout, rate limiting, or forced password change required.

Fix

Remove the hardcoded DefaultInternalAuthPasswordHash constant. Require operators to provide a hashed admin password in the configuration file. Alternatively, generate a random password on first startup, print it to stdout once, and immediately force a change on first login.

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