CVE-2026-6217 in Pik Online Portal
Summary
by MITRE • 09/04/2026
Use of a One-Way hash without a salt vulnerability in Pik Online Software Solutions Inc. Pik Online Portal allows Cryptanalysis.
This issue affects Pik Online Portal: through 3.5.1.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 09/04/2026
The vulnerability identified within the Pik Online Portal, specifically affecting versions up to and including 3.5.1, centers on a critical flaw in password storage mechanisms known as the use of one-way hashing without salting. In modern cybersecurity practices, storing user credentials requires more than just applying a cryptographic hash function like MD5 or SHA-256 directly to plaintext passwords. The absence of a unique salt value for each user's password significantly weakens the security posture by making stored hashes vulnerable to precomputed attacks such as rainbow table lookups and brute-force enumeration with optimized hardware accelerators. This architectural oversight represents a fundamental deviation from established best practices outlined in industry standards, most notably aligning with CWE-759 which classifies this issue under the use of a one-way hash without salt for password storage.
From an operational perspective, this flaw exposes user accounts to severe compromise risks if the underlying database is exfiltrated by an attacker. Without salts, identical passwords across multiple users result in identical hash values within the database. This uniformity allows attackers to process large dictionaries against the stolen data once and apply those results universally, drastically reducing the time required to crack a significant portion of user credentials. Furthermore, it eliminates the benefit of unique password policies where even similar passwords would produce distinct hashes due to randomization. The lack of salting effectively neutralizes defenses that rely on computational cost per guess, enabling rapid parallelized cracking efforts using common tools and techniques documented in the MITRE ATT&CK framework under credential access tactics such as T1110 which covers brute force attacks.
The impact extends beyond individual account compromise to potential lateral movement within the organization if users employ password reuse across different services. Attackers who successfully crack hashes can leverage these credentials against other platforms, leading to broader systemic breaches. Additionally, this vulnerability undermines regulatory compliance requirements for data protection and privacy, such as GDPR or HIPAA, which mandate appropriate technical measures to protect personal identifiable information including authentication secrets. The failure to implement salted hashing indicates a gap in the secure software development lifecycle, particularly during the design and implementation phases where cryptographic controls should have been rigorously applied.
To mitigate this vulnerability, immediate remediation is required by migrating all stored password hashes to use strong, adaptive key derivation functions such as Argon2id, bcrypt, or scrypt. These algorithms inherently incorporate salting mechanisms and are designed to be computationally expensive, thereby increasing the cost of brute-force attacks significantly. Developers must ensure that a unique, cryptographically secure random salt is generated for each user upon password creation or change, ensuring that even identical passwords result in distinct hash outputs. It is also advisable to implement rate limiting on login attempts and multi-factor authentication as additional layers of defense while legacy hashes are being re-hashed with the new algorithmic standards. Regular security audits and static code analysis should be employed to detect similar patterns in other parts of the application logic, ensuring comprehensive protection against credential-based attacks.