published October 6, 2026
Use of Password Hash With Insufficient Computational Effort vulnerability in danielberkompas cloak_ecto and danielberkompas cloak allows an attacker who holds the hashed values and the configured secret to brute-force low-entropy plaintexts much faster than configured.
The dump/1 callback that Cloak.Ecto.PBKDF2 (Cloak.Fields.PBKDF2 in cloak before the Ecto code moved to cloak_ecto) injects into a field module calls :pbkdf2.pbkdf2/4 with config[:size] in the iteration-count position. The :iterations setting is validated but never used. With the cloak_ecto defaults (iterations: 600_000, size: 32) each hash runs 32 PBKDF2 rounds instead of 600,000, so offline guessing of values such as email addresses costs about 18,750 times less than configured.
This issue affects cloak_ecto: from 1.0.0-alpha.0 onward; cloak: from 0.7.0 before 1.0.0-alpha.0.