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You mean like how Authy specialised in two-factor authentication, but still managed to have basic string concatenation bugs that rendered their entire 2FA system bypassable?


Huh? This is the first I've heard about this, and searching for "Authy concatenation bug" isn't turning up anything useful.


Here's the write-up from Homokov. The guy is a pen-testing genius: http://sakurity.com/blog/2015/03/15/authy_bypass.html

But if you just want the money shot: http://sakurity.com/img/smsauthy.png

Yes. Typing '../sms' in the field bypassed the 2nd factor. Just, wow.


Huh. Well now I know. Thanks!

Amazing what you can do with improperly-implemented input sanitation :)

This probably could've been prevented by disallowing non-number inputs, no?


"In fact the root of the problem was default Sinatra dependency 'rack-protection'".

They were doing the input sanitation, but it wasn't the very first thing in the processing pipeline, since "best practice" was to pipe everything through 'rack-protection' first.

Homokov was first to state, this was really a black-swan type bug which 99.9% of the time makes it into production. Apparently, they were doing the "right thing" and still got burned.


The parent meant "This probably could've been prevented by disallowing non-number inputs" in SDK libraries. Yes, if SDK would cast everything to digits it wouldn't be possible. It is also quite obvious security-in-depth for a 2FA API. Now they do it.

*HomAkov


Or even just input validation on the form itself before passing on to the API, which is more of what I was getting at. I don't know about the details of Authy's setup, but I know that AJAX (for example) supports enforcement of specific value types in text fields.

Basically, the form itself could have (and maybe even should have) required numeric-only values, seeing as Authy's codes are either 6 or 7 digits long and contain no alphabetical or special characters.


:-( Sorry, typo. And HN won't let me edit now, grrr!



hey, that causes some immediate stir in my mind as a user of Authy. Could you share any reference to the incident you mentioned?



... no? no I don't mean like Authy.




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