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Gmail Messages Are Vulnerable To Interception
Michael Wally writes "GMail messages are vulnerable to interception. An attacker has only to transmit malformed test messages to himself, and information left over in memory, from previous messages destined for other people, will appear with the test messages, in the attacker's inbox. Sometimes, this information may include usernames and passwords... Do you use GMail? Are your communications private? Should they be? Well, here's what we figured out about the issue, that may or may not help you - or perhaps GMail, if anyone can get ahold of their developers, to tell them about it." Update: 01/12 22:21 GMT by T : Good news for Gmail users; those malformed messages are no longer being accepted; read below for a message from Chris DiBona.
chrisd writes "Just so you know, at 10:15am PST mails with the problematic formatting as described in your previous story stopped being accepted into Gmail. Previous emails that had this problem will also no longer will be accessible. If you don't mind, I'd like to take the time to remind Slashdot readers that they can send bugs that may have a security aspect into security@google.com. If they like, they should feel free to cc me at cdibona@google.com. We appreciate your patience and we're sorry about the bug."
Google will work out the kinks, they always do.
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
Oh, sure, it means ready to be shipped/used in production by some companies, but has that line gotten to fuzzy for some people?
"that's not a feature, that's a bug"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is just a shot in the dark, but I'm willing to bet Google left Security off the list on purpose. a security flaw becomes a lot harder to exploit if the general public does not know it is there.
I don't hold this against Google at all. I'm glad they are not telling the world how to break into my account...
Speaking loudly in a public place can be intercepted!
Although this appears to be a valid bug in GMail (that is still beta mind you, and will probably be fixed very quickly), who in the world considers plain text communication secure?
I have no idea who at my ISP has root access (or others that can gain root access) to read my plaintext mailbox.
Nothing to see here... please move along.
What do you mean, "I'm not even sure how this bug could exist in any normal computing system"? Buffer overruns are everywhere. Although the classic buffer overrun involves getting the app to write beyond the buffer's bounds and into the stack, this one is getting it to read beyond the point that it should. Unless the system has memory protection built in (and that is only possible on very recent processors) then this is entirely unsurprising. "Some kind of hybrid"? You're not making sense.
Why is everyone brushing this off by saying "well you should have known that email isnt secure, tough luck!"
:)
If Hotmail had this bug, everyone here would be up in arms.
Just because email isnt secure doesnt mean this isn't serious. I would hate to think of all the people reading my responses to craigslist postings
Chances are, since most email these days are spam, an attacker is going to have to go through a lot of spam before finding something interesting.
-bk
Many other people have pointed out that GMail is still in beta, and that if they would have told Google first it probably would have gotten quietly fixed without any damage being done.
Of course, they acknowledge that, but they're arguing that they're helping protect people by making them aware of the problem.
I call bullshit. This is about them wanting recognition for finding the bug. If they would have sent it to Google, it would have been fixed and no one would care who discovered it. Because they went public with it they can boast that they were the ones who found the bug.
Of course, it swings both ways. Now if someone uses this exploit and steals your password (which is honestly rather unlikely), you know who to blame for making it public knowledge before Google had the chance to fix it.
Jesus - am I the only one to recognize this bug?
This is just the most publicly seen instance but broken XML does this every single day.
Use the greater than and less than signs as data delimiters in the 'next generation' of data encoding (XML)? WTF were they thinking?
I'm not 100% they are using true XML but from the looks of it if they aren't they are using a home-built XML wanna-be and - well it looks like I was right a few years ago when I (unsuccessfully) campaigned against doing it that way. Not that I campaigned very loud, as I am basically a nobody.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
For these people to find a single issue in such a system, then say it's a shortcoming of gmail's QA process, and in the same breath ask for work - implying they've got the skills to even handle such a job - is insulting. Please, just because you're smart enough to expose a flaw once you stumbled onto it in no way means you are qualified to correct that or any other issue. Sometimes our QA team finds a flaw and even digs in the logs enough to pinpoint the problem but it can still take the developer who designed the code days to correct.
In other words, noticing that you're bleeding does not qualify you as a surgeon. Instead of publishing their finidings in a detailed how-to, these asshats should have forwarded the info to gmail and let them deal with it, and that's assuming that the gmail team didn't already have it in their list of bugs. I just don't understand why people feel the need to not only describe a security problem, but give every hacker on the net a roadmap as to just exactly how to use it and what illicit activity it might be good for.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
People are always saying that, but it just isn't true. Relying only on obscurity for security is probably a bad idea, but as part of a complete security solution, it can be very helpful.
People will not successfully exploit a vulnerability they do not know about, or attack a system they do not know is there. Even if some fraction of people are in the know, you've reduced your potential attacker count by the fraction of them who are not in the know.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
lots of comments here are noting the hubris of these guys in asking for jobs.
I'd just like to add that not only are they criticizing the company's QA process and releasing the bug without having notified google first, as others pointed out...
They found the exploit by MISTAKE! It was a bug in their own code that caused the problem, something as stupid as a missing caret at the end of a line. So, in other words, they are looking for work looking for bugs in Google's software that they found solely because of a bug in the software they wrote.
On another note, bugs in software happen, no matter WHO you are, the trick is just to be able to fix them in a timely fashion and deal with the situation effectively. I believe that Google will do this, especially if the previous comment stating that it has been patched is true. Everyone is making too big a deal out of something that has happened to every developer on every software ever. The reason MS gets crap for it is simply because they continuously produce buggy code ridden with security issues, but deny this is the case, and often ignore security problems until they are found out by the general public.
-Jay