There was a chap on here the other day who said they hate 2fa and don’t need it because they use passwords that are 50 characters and generated by the password manager.
This is a perfect example of why you should always activate it when possible.
Alot of people don’t like Microsoft, but they’re pushing for zero password authentication for a reason. Passwords are getting really insecure really fast.
This vulnerability has nothing to do with password strength or security and everything to do with password reset security, i.e. email and improper handling of parameters to that reset API call.
Passkeys are interesting and potentially quite strong but they’re going to have to fall back to the same old reset mechanism if you e.g. drop your passkey device (phone) into a lake.
Or just make it clear your account is gone if you lose your passkey, so have a second key for backup or learn a hard lesson.
Have they given up on their “Passwords are insecure, use this 4 digit pin instead” push?
I just use their Authenticator app out of convenience, I get a notification when I login through it and it asks me to input the correct number given by the app, a 2 digit number.
How does Microsoft’s implementation work?
Is it possible to log into windows without a Microsoft account using that method?
I don’t know about windows specifically, but for outlook they’re pushing their authenticator app (you can use any) and SMS or email one time links. I think it works really well, and almost all attempts to access my account have stopped tbh, they can’t phish for my password if I don’t have a password.
Yeah this is being standardized at the mobile hardware level now with
https://fidoalliance.org/passkeys/
https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-password/
That reverse-code thing is super annoying. The next vector is through the shitty app itself.
I see a lot of people around me resetting passwords of services they rarely use because they forgot what password they used and don’t have a password manager (or not synced one). And I don’t understand why all services don’t propose to generate a one time link to log in instead of changing passwords (a few services do propose it already)
Passwords are useless for all users using the same password for every account they have, and i’m sure it’s a majority of users.
Google is moving that way with passkeys. I think it’ll catch on with many people.
Just cut the passwords out and go straight to unlocking with a device.
That said not sure what happens if you lose your device.
don’t even have to lose the device
phone is the most common, plenty of ways in from mitm attacks (insecure wifi for example) to social eng the account phone provider
guess you could go the dongle route but if it was super common thieves would just target them
I think the question is less about getting hacked and more about getting permanently locked out of your account.
sure but it shouldn’t be, any good process will have some recovery method
course that can be a vulnerability as well
thank god recovery questions are dead
The idea with passkeys though is that it’s like a dongle, not just your phone number. It’s not an SMS code or link, it uses the cryptography hardware of your phone to authenticate. But the question of “what happens if I lose my phone” still persists.
https://fidoalliance.org/passkeys/
https://developer.apple.com/passkeys/
https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-password/amp/
I mean it’s just 2fa without the password so same issues with what I described
https://www.csoonline.com/article/570795/how-to-hack-2fa.html
just the first result on google
“5 ways to hack 2FA” is pretty click-baity though. All of those attacks are either not exclusively related to 2FA or could target another component. If you can just bypass security altogether, instead of questioning 2FA, you should consider ditching that service/site.
All except point 1, that is. But everyone should know by now that 2FA by SMS is insecure.
How do you secure email accounts then? And wouldn’t that make those just even more attractive targets?
I don’t have 2FA for my GitLab account since it’s only accesible via my GitHub account which has 2FA. Is this good or should I add 2FA to GitLab also?
If you have to use your GitHub 2fa to sign in that’s fine I would assume.
This isn’t necessarily true. If you are using an identity provider, you can still perform a password reset on GitLab and set a password there, bypassing your 2FA on GitHub. You usually shouldnt rely on IdP 2FA unless the destination system enforces IdP signin every time. There is a group setting in GitLab that does that, but it will only apply for that group.
Okay, thanks!
One of the biggest issues with 2fa is that normally it’s either an easily spoofable phone/email or an app locked to a device.
This is why I use a password manager (pass) that is synced across all of my devices (via a private self hosted git for version control) that I can send 2fa QR codes to cameraless devices via screenshots using zbarimg and have every device capable of 2fa verification with the pass-otp extension.
I know this setup is a bit complicated as just dealing with git or importing a gpg key would give most people I know sense of existential dread. I am curious to see what others use for similar functionality.
We use gitlab ultimate at my work, I’m the main admin of the instance. Like 2 weeks ago when there was the cvss 10 vuln, gitlab sent us a .patch file to apply to the instance instead of releasing a new minor cause they didn’t wanna make the vuln public yet. I guess that’s coordinated disclosure, but I still found that remarkably jank.
How often do y’all update yours?
Yum upgrade. Nightly. Since about v9.
bruh, feels like gitlab has security update every other day, it’s some bullshit even for a project this size. And who knows how many 0-days are around.
I’ve been hanging a version back for a while now. Although my instance isn’t public, it’s ridiculous how many CVEs I have dodged by not updating. SolarWinds all over again.
And their license cost increases at almost the same rate.
No it doesn’t. Gitlab’s pricing has been pretty stable, with one increase in the premium tier in the past six years ($19 --> $29 per user per month).
There were more increases, they just changed the tier names and billing terms, so it’s somewhat hard to find historical information of previous prices. Our company ditched it after the 52% increase in 2023, especially because we were still adjusting to the price increase from 2021, which for us was $6 per user per month. I think in 2018 or 2019 it was $3 per user per month, so there must have been another increase that happened between 2018 and 2021. This was all for self hosted, so we had the additional cost of hardware and to maintain the services.
I really wanted to support GitLab, but the price simply became too much to justify.
Check gitlab-rails/production_json.log for HTTP requests to the /users/password path with params.value.email consisting of a JSON array with multiple email addresses.
Jesus Christ. Their frontend was sending a list of recipients to the backend. That’s an intern developer level of fuck up, in their login system, no less.
If this got past them, it’s a sign of deep problems.
Holy shit, that’s the rookiest mistake.
Can you explain in a bit more detail what you understand was happening?
Not the commenter but it seems like the parameters of the HTTP Get/Post weren’t protected/checked. The API was likely something like: Email to reset: string(email account to reset) But it accepted something like: [string(email account to reset), string (email to which the reset mail is sent to)]
Little Bobby Tables? Or would that be an XHR attack?
Bobby table, this, buffer overflow… Are all similar in spirit.
Bobby table is a way for hiding the malicious SQL query after a normal query (in that case after the select with “Bobby” you inject the malicious drop table)
In this case after the normal email (that normally would serve for both identifying the user and for the mail to send the recovering mail), the attacker sends two mails, the first is fo identifying the user the second to send the recovering mail
In the case of buffer overflow you inject malicious code after normal(-ish) data
It’s not an XHR attack since for the mail recovery workflow you don’t need an authenticated session.
To be a bit more compassionate to the developers, this is probably some dynamic typing problem. Probably ruby is “smart” into understand that an array can contain strings after all… So an array of strings is as good as a string… But here we go into static vs dynamic typing… And it’s a bit of religious war (fun fact in 2011 i was advocating with Guido Van Rossum in having at least an optional static typing check in Python - at the time the discussion was how to make python faster/compiled - and he was borderline mocking me 😅 and few years after pytypes but still no compilation at horizon 😂)
Thanks for the explanation, my friend!
My problem is that I am a hopeless generalist (which basically means I invariably find myself in support positions rather than what I actually should be doing), and IT is an endless jungle. I’m too curious for my own good.
