Facebook Exploits

[White_Eskimo]

I would imagine that the vast majority are not aware that there might be an issue.

Thats where education and awareness programs comes into play

But anyone cannot do that. For example this is a wired ADSL connection that will only work down my telephone line ........... how can you easily intercept my traffic and obtain my credentials?

I don't know how you define easy, but there are generally many ways to take advantage of a security exploit. MITM attacks are the simplest, so I used them for reference. There have been many browser "hacks" that allow scripts to violate the same site origin policy. Signed scripts allow for this as well. It would be easy to send a random user on a subnet far far away a link that would perform some type of XSS attack. Maybe not a 10 minute hack, but still very possible.

If the majority of people used wireless and/or a communal network such as in a school or college then there might be an issue, but this does not describe the majority of users. In that situation it is really a case of the environment being fundamentally insecure in the first instance.

Here in the US, most of the people on Facebook are college kids. In fact, emarkerter released a survey stating that Facebook is the most visited site for females ages 17 - 25. (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004636) My campus’s wireless network is open and insecure. If I were to stick up a wireless repeater behind a hub, and sniff the link waiting for people to join, I could easily sniff their traffic. Obviously, this is illegal and would most likely get me kicked out, but it IS possible to do, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some have gotten away with it. The fact of the matter is that just because something is illegal, people/corporations shouldnt assume that it wont be done. There best bet is to implement additional security features.

You do have a point about assumptions being made. Many sites assume that you have a secure connection, because in the case of most private individuals that is probably true?

I dont mean to sound paranoid, but I never assume an online connection is secure. I think that web services should implement additional layers of security in order to render my experience more secure. Obviously, there is a limit as to what a company should do, but just because I use their free service doesnt entitle my account to be randomly hacked. In fact, if my account ever was hacked while using a free service, I would probably never upgrade to the full version!

They also assume that it is your responsibility to make sure that your system is secure.

You are right and they are unfortunately wrong. No one should assume anything about my system. Building a web service that is only capable of running in a certain browser, with JavaScript enabled, for a Windows machine is a very bad approach. Again, obviously most web services wont be able to support every single browser and set up out there, but still, I would expect a larger service like Flickr or Facebook to take the time to ensure that their services work properly (and securely) on most systems. They can't do much about a keylogger as d34dl0k1 pointed out, but they definitely should be doing all they can do!

I would certainly accept criticism of sites for poor session management as that is just bad housekeeping. Most of the rest is really down to the user not understanding the insecurity of what they are doing.

Unfortunately we live in a world where very few users actually are aware of the dangers they face on the Web. I believe that the few individuals out there with knowledge must stand up to protect the rights of others. Users upload tons of pictures on Flickr and Facebook. If my friends had the entire “first year of college” picture album erased by some punk hacker, I am sure they would be pissed. Just because users aren’t aware of a vulnerability doesn’t mean that the vulnerability shouldn’t be fixed.

EDIT: I suppose you need to consider what these sites are about. They are supposed to be communities? I guess that when they were conceived nobody really thought about security because they didn't see them as potential targets for malicious people?

The fact that they are personal in nature possibly led them to that conclusion.

I don't know the details of how FP and Flickr work, but I would be curious to know if the cookie is still required after the session has been established? If it isn't, then deleting it would seem to be a solution.

Otherwise only use these services in a discrete session and clear your cookies afterwards?

yup, cookies are still required after login for both sites. I really do think that the best solution is to store the user's IP address inside of the spawned session. If someone tries to access the site with the same cookie credentials but the wrong IP address, they will be denied access. If they attempt to spoof the IP address, then the server will respond to the spoofed IP address and NOT the malicious hacker. The innocent user's machine will deny the packet automatically because there was never a request made. Information should be stored both on the client and server side. If all of the necessary information is stored in one area, it is very prone to failure and attack.

After researching this stuff and developing a lot of crap myself, I have come to the conclusion that Web 2.0 still has a huge amount of room for improvement. My paper talks about web services incorporating technologies that renders their site more vulnerable to being exploited. Sure there is more eye candy and fancy features, but if someone can destroy my entire account, then what is the point? As sites rely on more technology, they must also be willing to dedicate the time and assets to create a secure user experience. Web services should not bet on the fact that their users are too dumb to understand security vulnerabilities, and they should not just assume that the browser and network are secure.


Sorry nihil for writing you a textbook ☺ Thank you very much for your comments! I really do think that we need more people thinking about this sort of stuff and realizing how much change is needed.