Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinKNOW Insufficiently Protected Credentials

Summary

Oxford Nanopore Technologies' MinKNOW software at or prior to version 24.11 stores authentication tokens in a file located in the system's temporary directory (/tmp) on the host machine. This directory is typically world-readable, allowing any local user or application to access the token. If the token is leaked (e.g., via malware infection or other local exploit), and remote access is enabled, it can be used to establish unauthorized remote connections to the sequencer. Remote access must be enabled for remote exploitation to succeed. This may occur either because the user has enabled remote access for legitimate operational reasons or because malware with elevated privileges (e.g., sudo access) enables it without user consent. This vulnerability can be chained with remote access capabilities to generate a developer token from a remote device. Developer tokens can be created with arbitrary expiration dates, enabling persistent access to the sequencer and bypassing standard authentication mechanisms.