CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-28924 — An issue was discovered in Rclone before 1.53.3

High CVSS 7.5

An issue was discovered in Rclone before 1.53.3. Due to the use of a weak random number generator, the password generator has been producing weak passwords with much less entropy than advertised. The suggested passwords depend deterministically on the time the second rclone was started. This limits the entropy of the passwords enormously. These passwords are often used in the crypt backend for encryption of data. It would be possible to make a dictionary of all possible passwords with about 38 million entries per password length. This would make decryption of secret material possible with a plausible amount of effort. NOTE: all passwords generated by affected versions should be changed.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-11-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-331, CWE-338

Affected products

  • rclone / rclone
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 33

Matched remediation archetype

Cryptography, certificate, signature, and channel validation

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Inventory affected algorithms, key uses, trust stores, certificate validation settings, random sources, and plaintext channels across clients and services.
  • Determine which secrets, identities, signatures, or data protections depend on the affected primitive or validation path.
  • Check debug, compatibility, fallback, and hostname or audience override settings in build and runtime configuration.

Remediate safely

  • Use a maintained platform cryptographic API with approved algorithms, modes, parameters, randomness, and full peer identity validation.
  • Remove insecure fallback and validation bypasses; separate keys by purpose and load them from managed secret storage.
  • Plan rotation or reissuance for affected keys, certificates, tokens, hashes, or ciphertext and document compatibility sequencing.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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