Siraj Sayeed

Hacking DB password in CF Datasource

by Siraj Sayeed on Sep.26, 2007, under ColdFusion, Database

I wanted to create a new datasource in CF Admin but somehow I could not find the password associated to the user account in the database. Of course, I could create a new user in the DB, assign a new password and use that password in CF Admin. But I did not want to do that either. And retrieving password from the database using some third party tool seemed too risky. So I started looking into the neo-query.xml file where ColdFusion stores all the data source information. The file resides in “\cfusion-ear\cfusion-war\WEB-INF\cfusion\lib” folder. I went into another JRun instance, opened up the ‘neo-query.xml’ and copied the encrypted password string for the same database-user combination from that and pasted it into the instance I am working on. I had to restart the CF server after saving the file. And as expected, the datasource worked! Sweet!! Next time I will probably ask the DBA for the password instead of going through all the hassle…:-)

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