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How To Hack Twitter's Two-Factor Authentication
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from PC Mag's SecurityWatch: "We've pointed out some problems with Twitter's new two-factor authentication. For example, since just one phone number can be associated with an account, Twitter's two-factor authentication won't work for organizations like the Associated Press, The Onion, or The Guardian. They were hacked; they could still be hacked again in the same way. However, security experts indicate that the problem is worse than that, a lot worse."
loved how they read from the bottom of the screen. Please give me a nice telepromter for my youtube vids
work in progress
the problem is worse than that, a lot worse
Problem? Worse? This is twitter we're talking about right?
If sending an unencrypted email is like sending a postcard (kids, ask your parents) in pencil, twitter is like a sign you stick in your lawn.
Anyone can drive by and stick a sign in your lawn, make it look like you support any cause, or take any sign you've put out.
Now if people put undue weight to those signs, it they swing the markets, then the issue--the problem--is people who don't know the difference between reliable and unreliable sources.
The problem isn't twitter, it's employees in the media and so-called journalists who'd rather sit on their bum checking their cell phone than go out and do their job.
Seriously who gives a fuck about twitter and who puts so much weight into what is said?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
My twitter account, like all my others(like banking etc) are tied to my various gmail accounts, which are also two-factor authenticated. So in order to change my password for example on my twitter account, you would need to hack into my twitter account then hack into my gmail account(password + 2-factor auth.) to check the email so that you can change the password.
I don't know if this makes it more difficult or if i should hold out.
The two-factor authentication is supposed to protect against a man-in-the-middle attack. The problem is that the verification response from the second factor goes back through the same already-compromised channel.
Imagine you're a sophisticated vilain in some backwater part of the world. You notice there's an AP reporter there doing some long-term investigative journalism, and said reporter likes to file his reports from a particular internet cafe.
You hack the cafe's wifi and somehow convince the reporter that his Twitter account has already been hacked -- say, by showing him a tweet in his name of something outrageous. The reporter, panicked, resets his account -- but does so through your fake Twitter authentication. You now capture both his password and the second factor sent through his text message; you now own his Twitter account.
And you now go ahead and actually send out some outrageous tweet as this particular reporter. Perhaps you pull off your attack while some very important person is visiting, and you report said person's assassination. You know this will crash the markets, and so you short all the proper stocks and make a killing...on the market.
Is it wise for people to have the trust they do in Twitter? Hell no. Do they have such trust anyway? Yes.
Which is why this is a big deal.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Everything that happened in there is legit. He probably used some type of defense called Hawk to deal with Twitter hacks.
The fundamental problem here is that the user logs into a fake twitter site and gives the login credentials. Then gives the second factor authentication too. This scenario can not be protected against no matter how many factors you use. In fact if I keep logging into a fake google site and keep entering all the credentials how can google stop it?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This happens in Facebook and is encourage by Facebook all the time !
How is this different from Google's 2-factor authentication?
I'm not familiar with Toopher specifically, but the general idea works quite well. We've been doing it for fifteen years.
I always post on Slashdot using a small Android phone in Bryan, TX, and my ISP is Suddenlink. I've posted on Slashdot hundreds, if not thousands of times. 20 minutes after I make this post from here in Bryan, if someone claiming to me tries to log in using an iphone in Canada, that's guaranteed to be bogus. That's a simple, obvious, and common example.
Now take that same general idea and apply fifteen years of R&D and real world experience. You can catch most unauthorized login attempts. If you do any late night surfing, on sites like GirlsGoneWild.com, you may have noticed half of those sites say "protected by Strongbox". They do that because it works.
How is this different from Google's 2-step auth? I think both work basically in the same way.
Anything more than a Single Factor is useless for security. Two Factors means it's certainly not a prime!
"You can't make anything idiot proof because idiots are so ingenious"
Instead of using some custom two-factor authentication which is bound to a specific phone, they should use TOTP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_One-time_Password_Algorithm). Then the same shared secret could be configured into several token generators (e.g. Google Authenticator on Android).
TOTP seems to become the standard for two-factor authentication, given that both Facebook and Google use this (Facebook provides its own limited code generator with their App) and also quite a few other significant services (e.g. Dropbox, Amazon AWS).
Google also provides a pam module for TOTP which allows one to setup TOTP for own services. I tried that yesterday: Installed the PAM module and added a key into Google Authenticator. Result: TOTP secured SSH login (by using normal account password with the token appended). TOTP support can also be added to non-PAM capable applications, for example a TOTP extension for Mediawiki exists. I tried that one as well and it is working great.
Google Authenticator App allows one to configure more than one account, so you can secure different services with TOTP and still have one central token generator App.
It's the users fault for entering their credentials in a fake site. There should be SSL when you enter your password on twitter. That means there should be a verification icon in the URL bar with "Twitter, Inc [US]" on it.
You don't need N-factor authentication to be secure, the problem is most companies implented half a-- 1 factor to begin with, and instead of fixing their authentication decide to implement half a-- 2 factor authentication. If you don't do it correctly it doesn't matter how many factors you think are cool in meeting rooms
None of these organizations have direct inward dialing?
How far behind the times are they?