Huge iPhone Cut-and-Paste Tool Security Flaw

Harry writes "I'm using Pastebud, the new third-party copy-and-paste solution for the iPhone. It's extremely clever, using a Web-based clipboard to get around the fact that Apple doesn't provide one on the phone. Unfortunately, it seems to be giving users access to e-mails that other Pastebud users send to their clipboards. This has happened to me repeatedly and is being reported by other users in Pastebud's Get Satisfaction support forum. Pastebud is operational and still doing this as I write, even though a message at Get Satisfaction says they're working on the problem."

Comments

You reap what you sow...

[An Ominous Cow Erred]

...well you *ARE* trusting a small, third party entity with your data on the internet. Can you really expect things that are not on storage you monitor yourself to be secure? Furthermore, why can't it just store your clipboard through local storage? Does it really have to put it up online? Do Apple's apps have no way to store and retrieve local data?

Apple really should have this feature built in, but you shouldn't be surprised when your workaround that involves dumping your unencrypted data on a server somewhere has security issues.

Re:You reap what you sow...

[Naurgrim]

Ya, if I read this correctly, a quick scan of TFA (I know, not supposed to do that here) seems to indicate this is a *Pastebud problem, not an iPhone problem. Of course, if the iPhone does not have cut'n'paste, that's entirely another problem.

Re:You reap what you sow...

[larry bagina]

Apps are chrooted into their own directory structure, so they can't share data. But, yeah, this is people surprised to get what they should have expected.

Re:You reap what you sow...

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore, why can't it just store your clipboard through local storage? Does it really have to put it up online?

You're looking for OpenClip. It's basically an open spec (well, as open as it can get under Apple's terms) for clipboards on the iPhone, and is supported by several applications. MagicPad is the notepad replacement that is written by the same folks.

Do Apple's apps have no way to store and retrieve local data?

iPhone applications have read-only access to the data of other applications. This prevents the creation of a single app that acts as a clipboard, since you can't (yet) have background apps.

What OpenClip does is specify a standard location in each app for clipboard data. When an app copies, it simply sets this variable to the clipped data. When an app wants to paste, it looks for clipped data in all the installed apps and uses the latest. it wastes a bit of memory if you have copied data from multiple apps, but it's pretty good given the technology. And there's no Internet involved.

Re:You reap what you sow...

[makomk]

According to the OpenClip website, Apple killed it off by tightening up the sandbox so that applications can't read each other's data. This doesn't surprise me.

FROM TFA:

[mdaitc]

(NOTE: Jed Schmidt of Pastebud fixed the problem I discuss in this post yesterday night after I notified him about it. It affected only users-such as me-who misconfigured the service. Scroll down for details...)

Harry,

I've updated this issue over at Get Satisfaction[1], but let me just summarize what exactly was going wrong: you were inadvertently forwarding your emails not to your secret pastebud address, but to the address set as the from address for these emails, which was noreply@pastebud.com.

This happened to other folks too; instead of sending email to secret-random-string@pastebud.com, they were sending to noreply@pastebud.com. And everyone who was doing this ended up sharing the same clipboard.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that we've fixed it, and the changed will be live by the morning. You can find more details about the issue here[1].

Thanks again for bringing this to our attention, and let me know if there's anything else you need clarification on.

Jed Schmidt
Founder, pastebud

Re:FROM TFA:

[gcnaddict]

So what you're trying to tell us is that this story...

...needs a usererror tag, right?

Why does it go to a server, anyway?

[The Amazing Fish Boy]

When I first heard of this trick, I thought it was pretty damn clever. But the way I'd imagined it from the headline was that it would use the mailto: pseudo-protocol to paste to Mail, and would use HTML5 client-side database or a cookie of some sort to store it in the browser. My idea was basically three bookmarklets:

1. Copy: Stores selected text in client-side database or cookie
2. Paste: Pastes into text field in browser
3. Paste to Mail: Opens a URL to mailto:replace@this.com?body=$clipboardContents

Obviously this wouldn't work for copying from Mail to Safari, but I was kind of confused as to when that would come in handy anyway. The trade-off for security would be worth it, and if you really wanted to, you could still do a trip to a server for Mail-to-Safari copying.

I haven't delved into the bookmarklets yet, so maybe it's not possible for some reason, but does anyone know why they would choose to have it make a trip to the server when it seems like it could be pretty easily avoided?

Re:Why does it go to a server, anyway?

[Achromatic1978]

My God. How fucking horrible are -any- of these solutions?!? This one, a local one, whatever. They're all fucking horrible! All because The Steve says cut-n-paste is not for a touch screen phone. Ye gods. But apparently this is acceptable to the RDF'ed masses. I've read countless blog posts justifying the 'no cut and paste' as being a good idea, anything to require no admission of the fact that it's an ugly stupid and inexcusable UI flaw.

Re:Why does it go to a server, anyway?

[furball]

I have a hunch that Steve is looking for something a lot better than text copy-paste. Copy-paste done correctly is more complicated than you think it is.

If I copy text, does it copy attributes? Does bold text retains its boldness? Etc.

What happens when I want to copy an email address from the address book? Am I limited to copying read-only text or read-write text? Why can't I copy a whole address book entry? What happens when I paste the address book entry?

Re:Why does it go to a server, anyway?

[Jay L]

Not sure where you've read the countless defenses of lack-of-cut-and-paste, but Apple doesn't seem to agree. It's on their list; other things were higher on their list. I myself don't care about Exchange-server compatibility, and would MUCH rather have cut-and-paste. I'm sure others have their own personally-improved priority lists.

I think Apple's done pretty well for an OS that's only 18 months out of the gate. Anything that new is bound to have some of what I call "unconscionably absent" features. I'm looking forward to cut-and-paste.

Re:Why does it go to a server, anyway?

[db32]

That one is easy...Because that is what Microsoft does. They push out half completed bullshit products on their base and then say "well it will probably work right by the time SP2 comes along".

Do it right the first time and don't put it out there until it is done right. Otherwise you fuck up your reputation. It is a lot harder to get the word out of "Hey, iPhone cut and paste is new and improved and actually works like it should now!" rather than "New iPhone 3.0! Now with Cut and Paste!". Most users are going to bump into the cut and paste you describe and not even begin to understand why it is so crippled.

Also...having used an iPhone...cut and paste would be nice, but I doubt I would use it much because cut and paste on a touch screen run by your finger would be a royal pain in the fucking ass. Your finger is as big as most words on the screen, you would have a god aweful time trying to accurately cut and paste.

Re:Why does it go to a server, anyway?

[nneonneo]

Yes, on OS X, you would use the NSPasteBoard class to interact with the system-wide clipboard. The only thing stopping Apple from implementing NSPasteBoard in the iPhone SDK appears to be the question of how to implement it best in the UI. The system of NSPasteBoard filters handles all the gritty details of converting data between different formats; a given pasteboard can hold data in a specific format (or even multiple formats at once), and the client can invoke a filter to read the data from the PB using any applicable filters. Honestly, everything is in place API-wise, it seems that Apple simply wants to work out the UI (there is, in fact, more than one way to do it, but it seems they are dragging their heels with this important feature!)

Re:Why does it go to a server, anyway?

[Sancho]

I have an iPhone, and I use it regularly. There have been exactly two times when I wished that I had copy/paste. So no, I don't see what the big deal is. I don't think that lack of copy/paste was a good design decision--in fact, I'm sure that the phone would be better with it. But I don't think that it's a killer feature. I certainly don't think that the addition of copy/paste will make iPhone haters suddenly embrace the device--they'll just find something else to complain about.

No phone is perfect. The iPhone does what I want 99% of the time, and is stable. I can't say the same for any other smart phone I've tried (though I haven't had a chance to play with android yet, and probably won't bother until someone with 3G coverage in my area puts out an Android phone.)

Stop with the absurd holy wars over phone choice. Who cares what other people buy? If you don't like the phone, don't buy one. Leave everyone else alone.

Re:Why does it go to a server, anyway?

[Lars T.]

I have a hunch that Steve is looking for something a lot better than text copy-paste.

So? I'm sure that he- along with lots of other companies- is, but that's no excuse for leaving the facility out altogether until something better comes along!

Well, the excuse is that others have done exactly that, and thus Windows (and a lot of other stuff) is full of interface quirks that are still in because people got so used to them they reject the better fix. Which (at least in the Windows case) results in some apps supporting only the old, some only the new, and some being forced to support both. Heck, apps supporting just one method will often use the other for something completely else. Yeah, a fine solution that is.

Oh, you want an example? Try the keyboard command(s) for closing a window. Or the overlying MDI/SDI mess.

Think different

[lewko]

a message at Get Satisfaction says they're working on the problem
They've already done that.

I suspect they should start working on a solution...

Re:No bugs in Ninnle!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

No bugs in Ninnle!
If you switch to Ninnle Linux, your phone will be trouble free.

I'm impressed that Ninnle is so bug free that 3rd party apps are completely unexploitable.

Re:Take note of this Apple

[ImNotAtWork]

My wife has been complaining about lack of a clipboard ever since she got the blasted thing. I tell her "I told you to wait for android every time she complains."

When will companies learn to disable 'noreply'?

[JSBiff]

Seems like every few months you hear yet another story about something bad happening because people are replying to or otherwise using a 'noreply' email address. Here's a clue - if you ever send emails to anyone from a 'noreply' address (or some other similar account name), you better make damn sure your servers are configured to not do something bad or stupid when unobservant users actually do reply to it.

I will give them credit for this: *at least* it was noreply at their own domain. Too often, when you hear about this sort of thing, it's because a company did something like sending an email with a return address of 'noreply@donotreply.com' or something like that (where the domain is not their domain, and is a string which could potentially be registered by someone). I remember reading (ok, just found the story again) about a guy who had registered the domain 'donotreply.com' for yucks, and started getting all sorts of stuff like replies from Capital One bank customers, when Capital One sent some emails with the donotreply.com as the domain. (Sadly, the website www.donotreply.com where the guy used to blog about all the emails seems to be down now; wonder what happened to it - probably sunk by a lawsuit, or maybe the guy finally got bored of spending his free time reading thousands of emails).

Re:When will companies learn to disable 'noreply'?

[redJag]

Obviously this is some sort of Google service that is in beta..

Still no clipboard?

[erroneus]

No wait... in ALL this time, Apple still hasn't provided this basic functionality?

I wrote off the iPhone when I learned of the battery problem and haven't paid much attention to it since then. But one thing I expected to see resolved was the clipboard deficiency. I know some of my users were bouncing around happy when an update fixed some sync problem they were having and somehow among those fixes, I thought the clipboard feature was added, but I guess I was wrong.

One thing I find ironic about iPhone is that Apple has somehow managed to restrict the convenience and basic functionality right out of the machine. I won't deny iPhone's extremely enthusiastic fanbase. It is rather incredible. But the coolest thing one user had to show was the zippo lighter. Yes, it looks and acts like a zippo lighter and serves no function at all. (Now when it lights a virtual cigarette on another iPhone, I will be impressed!) But I find it more than a little amazing that Copy and Paste are still not present.

I think, perhaps, I understand why though. Apple may have created a security model that effectively prevents that from working -- even for themselves -- ever. If all apps, as I have read here, are chrooted to themselves and essentially shares nothing with the OS (which is somewhat hard to imagine...sharing nothing with the OS... how about some API code?) then it would seem that while security holes are effectively blocked forever, so too is basic functionality. Are iPhone apps not allowed to talk to a storage device that other iPhone apps are also allowed to talk to? It sounds like "no" since this paste program uses the inter-web to share data between apps. And what? This data isn't encrypted for individual users?