Vulnerability Assesment

The application
is used by system administrators (i.e. root users) to check
the strength of passwords on a system they manage.

For the purposes of this challenge, the application makes
some very simple checks (whether a user has a password which
is the same as his/her username, whether the password is
the username plus '1234' or '!@#$' patterns and finally,
whether the password is a 4-digit number).

For testing purposes candidates are instructed to use a 64-bit
Ubuntu 18.04.1 distribution (although other distributions
may also meet the runtime library requirements).

The application security assessment report must describe for each
vulnerability:
a) the technical description of the vulnerability ("what is it?",
"where in the binary is it?", "how can one trigger the vulnerability?")
b) the impact of the vulnerability ("what can an attacker gain
through exploitation?", "how does the vulnerability
affect the system and its users?")
c) a recommendation to the developers of the application ("what should
be done to mitigate the vulnerability").