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Often, while my students are working on a lab, I’ll take this time to search for more class demos. It seems that many of the demos we discuss in class soon get fixed. I’m not sure how or why, but this is often the case. Parameter manipulation — they’re all fixed within a few weeks of discussing them in class. The list goes on, but this is so frequent that I stopped tracking them. Regardless of the reasons, these vulnerabilities get fixed, and I’m glad they do. And I really don’t mind doing some basic research into finding more. So here’s today’s example, as it applies to password policy and authentication fun.
I’ll start off by listing some common authentication-related vulnerabilities I often see and then discuss some error messages I recently found on a popular travel site. I’ll also add some “malicious” ideas, just for fun–to get you thinking.
Common authentication-related vulnerabilities:
Related error messages from a recent find at a travel site:
Some initial thoughts
Do you see where this is going? The main culprit wasn’t the password policy itself. If I had to write the equation, it would look a lot like this (seriously):
Mediocre password policy + password hints + stored credit card info + having a lot of users + nongeneric error messages + not verifying anything on checkout = free trip to Mexico.
Now, let’s go cliff diving in Acapulco!
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