: Webgate Security Advisory :
:  Released by Teknix 2001  :
:  www.dark-alliance.co.uk  :

Summary:
Webgate is a fairly popular Java password protection applet for use
in protecting webpages from unauthorised users. It does however
contain several security flaws (which have been acknowledged by the
author).

Details:
Firstly, older versions of the product don't use any kind of encryption
on the password or url, and the user can't change the name or path to
the files storing the information without re-compiling the applet.

The files (located in the same directory as the applet) are:
· password.txt - the unencrypted password
· url.txt - the url to go to after the password has been entered

There is now a new version of WebGate which uses "encrypted passwords".
Unfortunatly, all that this encryption does is shift the letters up by
their position in the string, and they are still stored in the same
files as mentioned above.

So, the password 'aaaaa' becomes 'bcdef', 'letmein' becomes 'mgwqjns'
(a+1=b, a+2=c, b+3=d, etc)

You can find webgate at: http://cwessel.brinkster.net/webgate/

Solution:
For a temporary fix, you can rename the password.txt and url.txt files,
modify the code and recompile it. This will not however stop any
determined attacker, as they can just decompile the code to get the
new filenames.