Foursquare iPhone app sends passwords in plain text, don't use

http://martinkou.blogspot.com/2010/08/foursquare-considered-harmful-dont-use.html

by bitanarch • 16 years ago

119 52 16 years ago

martinkou.blogspot.com

Did a Wireshark session vs. Foursquare for iPhone's traffic after reading the news today. Found something very unpleasant.

tetrisgm• 16 years ago

Have you double checked? Seems weird, especially for a mobile checkin app that is much more likely to encourage using open wlans :/

phjohnst2• 16 years ago

Yeah, I have a hard time believing that this is accurate. Definitely scary if true, but I would like to put my faith in Foursquare having checked this box a long time ago.

Also: why, after millions of checkins over public networks, is this only coming up now? Surely someone would have got burned by this by now?

desigooner3• 16 years ago

>>Also: why, after millions of checkins over public networks, is this only coming up now? Surely someone would have got burned by this by now?

maybe because people usually check in over the Cellular data network and not wireless networks. I guess it'll be the same if there was a way to sniff out cellular data. Simple oversight or absence of a security mindset in app development.

I think one of the other geo-social-apps mandated checkins over WiFi (Loopt star i believe) .. It'll be interesting to see if they have the same flaw. In that case, it actually might be a bigger threat as the only way to send over information is over the wi-fi network.

jsz0• 16 years ago

Probably just because it's not very practical and there is no obvious payoff. You would have to sit around a popular spot for hours with a laptop sniffing the wifi to collect logins. What do you do with them? For SPAM purposes it would be easier to just make new accounts. As far as I know there's not a whole lot of valuable information in a FourSquare account like credit card numbers or banking information. Seems like the only thing you could really do is embarrass people.

kidsat• 16 years ago

HTTP port 80 traffic from Android app:

  GET /v1/checkins?geolat=34.2842613&geolong=-118.2471837&geohacc=112.0 HTTP/1.1
  User-Agent: com.joelapenna.foursquared:2010080500
  Host: api.foursquare.com
  Connection: Keep-Alive
  Authorization: Basic dXNlckBleGFtcGxlLmNvbTpwYXNzd29yZA==

HTTP port 80 traffic from iPhone app:

  POST /v1/checkin.json HTTP/1.1
  Host: api.foursquare.com
  User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2 like Mac OS X; en-us)
  Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
  Authorization: Basic dXNlckBleGFtcGxlLmNvbTpwYXNzd29yZA==
  Accept-Encoding: gzip
  Accept: */*
  Accept-Language: en-us
  Content-Length: 250
  Connection: keep-alive

woodrow• 16 years ago

In case this wasn't clear or you didn't read the article, 4sq is using HTTP Basic authentication:

  >>> base64.decodestring("dXNlckBleGFtcGxlLmNvbTpwYXNzd29yZA==")
  'user@example.com:password'

EricButler• 16 years ago

Foursquare doesn't support SSL at all. The best you can do is request a long-lived OAuth token, but even doing that requires sending the user's email/password in plaintext (although only once!).

whakojacko• 16 years ago

Yea I mentioned this on twitter to one of their engineers a several months ago and he said it was "on their to-do list." Seems a little too important for that.

j0• 16 years ago

it's been an issue on their getsatisfaction page for 10 months ... http://getsatisfaction.com/foursquare/topics/https-o65c ...

bitanarch7• 16 years ago

Double, and triple checked. You can reproduce this yourself. I'm using a MacBook Pro for this.

1. Plug your MBP to wired ethernet - you have one of these in your home, right?

2. Open an ad-hoc network in your MBP, and share Internet access via that ad-hoc network.

3. Connect your iPhone to your MBP's ad-hoc network, now it should be able to access the Internet via your MBP.

4. Install and fire up Wireshark in your MBP - make sure to read the instructions or otherwise it can't capture packets.

5. Get Wireshark to capture packets on the ad-hoc Wifi interface.

6. Filter out the HTTP packets going to *.foursquare.com by adding the filter 'http.host contains "foursquare"'

7. Fire up Foursquare on your iPhone, login if you haven't already

8. Boom, you've just sent your password in plain text, over the Internet.

kyro• 16 years ago

I'm doubtful. Have you quadruple checked?

pmjordan2• 16 years ago

Unless you're reusing passwords (which of course you shouldn't be), this doesn't really seem any worse than any other unencrypted website login, or hijacking authentication cookies from an unencrypted connection. The latter you could even do with gmail until they defaulted to SSL.

If you were using, say, Hacker News on a public wifi without going through a VPN or so, I could trivially log in as you just by looking at the Cookie: headers you send to it. I don't need your password to post as you and I probably could even change it because HN doesn't ask for your old password, but maybe it requires email confirmation in which case you just need to notice. Of course, HN is a similarly low-key target as 4sq for this sort of thing.

bitanarch7• 16 years ago

The damage of an intercepted cookie is limited to the site you're logged into - if I intercepted your Hacker News cookie, I can't use it to log into your bank account.

The damage of an intercepted password is much bigger. It's a fact that most people reuse passwords. You can't say the issue doesn't exist just because you shouldn't do it.

There're also services that are a lot more careful than that. e.g. Facebook Connect's API uses HTTPS for (at least) the login so you can't intercept the passwords, and then it uses an HMAC-like authentication so that even if an attacker can intercept any non-encrypted messages, they can't change it or impersonate you.

pmjordan2• 16 years ago

My point is I fail to see how this is an unusual or new situation. You can probably accuse millions of sites of sending passwords in the clear on login.

Besides: say I steal your HN (or whatever) cookie and hit logout from your account. Your auth cookie is now no longer valid, you get a login prompt. You assume it's some kind of glitch and re-login with your password, which I intercept. Is that much better?

bl4k• 16 years ago

sessions are a one-time token. passwords are an all time token. biometrics are a forever token.

TheEzEzz2• 16 years ago

Only tangentially related:

The other day I was trying to log on to a service I rarely use, and couldn't remember my password. So I started chugging through all the different passwords I use. Then I realized what a horrible idea that is. If the service wasn't benign (or if they were using plain text), I could have just let out ALL of my passwords.

Really, really stupid, but I wonder how many people do this, and how effective it could be as a way to collect passwords.

parenthesis• 16 years ago

A similar case is typing in your email password by mistake when (trying to) log in to a site where your email address is your username.

TheEzEzz2• 16 years ago

Good point.

I've been thinking about lazy registration a lot. I'm considering implementing a service where the user will be prompted at some point to enter their email to be remembered, but making a password optional.

The service would be worthless to hackers, but I suppose griefers could still have some fun.

simonw• 16 years ago

I believe that's a classic phishing trick. A really smart phishing site will tell you you got your password wrong a couple of times to harvest your password variants, then on the third attempt redirect you to the real site's login page so you can login there, hopefully unaware that you had ever been phishing.

js4all• 16 years ago

This is why I prefer sites using openid or oauth.

_cbsz2• 16 years ago

1) Foursquare was one of the most popular targets for DEFCON'S Wall of Sheep this year, next to Twitter. I believe the mayor of the con was also made the mayor of Sheeptown.

2) Their desktop site doesn't use SSL either, as my Unencrypted Password Warning Chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mjpinemnkjlppmem...) will warn you, so it should come as no surprise that mobile doesn't.

varaon• 16 years ago

Interesting extension, but Chrome gives an ominous "This extension needs access to your data on all sites." I assume this is necessary to be able to read the targets of forms.

desigooner3• 16 years ago

Yeah, I got the warning on quite some sites incl. get satisfaction and even twitter at one point. Does it give false positives?

mvip• 16 years ago

Well, that's the case for their regular website too! No SSL at all (http://foursquare.com/login).

callmeed• 16 years ago

Is it easier or harder to intercept a password over 3G than wifi? (I'm just curious)

theBobMcCormick• 16 years ago

It depends. Obviously unencrypted wifi is trivial to sniff, and WEP encrypted wifi is only modestly harder. However, wifi can be configured to be highly secure, with for example WPA2/AES, etc.

Both GSM and CDMA are encrypted, but I believe both have been broken and aren't considered as secure as something like WPA2/AES.

Keep in mind though, that it's not just the trip over the wireless network that's at issue, it's also anywhere on the Internet between you and the service you're using (Foursquare in this case).

valentin• 16 years ago

Traffic captured at Defcon 2010 Wall of Sheep

POP - 4.3% FTP - 6.7% IMAP - 10% HTTP - 23% Four Square - 23% Twitter - 33%

starnix17• 16 years ago

Foursquare's response: http://blog.foursquare.com/post/990202740/changes-to-our-aut...

tl;dr version: Implementing HTTPS, should be live in "coming weeks'.

foobarbazetc• 16 years ago

Incompetence of the highest order.

jacoblyles3• 16 years ago

What's the best way to handle this? Use HTTPS? I'm working on an app that will have a similar architecture.

kordless2• 16 years ago

Use tokens issued for a user and IP combination. Use HTTPS to carry the auth for the user and return a token. Use the token with HTTPS or HTTP to continue talking to the server. Expire tokens after some reasonable time. Expired tokens indicate you need to reauth. If you lose a token, it could only be used by someone pretending to be you (and with your IP), so limit what a token can do via the service's API if you want.

Additionally, keeping a user's clear text password in a local datastore is usually a 'bad idea'. At least store the MD5 or SHA-2 of the password (MD5 is considered insecure now though) and then pass the hash along to auth the user before giving them a token.

jacoblyles3• 16 years ago

Do cell phones keep the same IP address for any significant period of time?

bitanarch7• 16 years ago

Yes, that's basically the way to do it. If you're doing it on a mobile phone you can even add HMAC (via SHA-1 or SHA-2, MD5 is still ok for that but we all know it's possible to produce MD5 collisions now) on that token when you're talking on HTTP. That way, all messages on the network will be at least authenticated.

The IP checking bit is probably not a good idea. A mobile phone user can be switching between 3G and a public Wifi hotspot as he goes. It can negatively affect user experience.

bitanarch7• 16 years ago

You can follow Facebook Connect's example. A few points there..

1. Logins must be done on HTTPS. On the SSL level, the client must authenticate the server's certificate - i.e. the client must check whether the server's certificate is properly signed by a trusted CA, and whether the server peer name matches the name that's being connected to, e.g. api.example.com. This means nobody will be able to intercept the encrypted passwords via man-in-the-middle attacks (e.g. by hijacking a DNS and redirecting traffic to his fake api.example.com server).

With proper server certificate authenticate in place, only the person/company/server with api.example.com's private key will be able to decrypt the HTTPS traffic going into api.example.com. So as long as nobody working for example.com posts the private key on Slashdot or HN, nobody outside of example.com will be able to intercept the login passwords - assuming they don't have other security holes like SQL injection problems.

2. HMAC or HMAC-like scheme based on shared secrets and sequence numbers. If you intend to let clients use your API via HTTP instead of HTTPS after the login step, e.g. for performance reasons - frequent HTTPS handshake can slow your app down a lot when you take network latency into account - you'd need to have a way to authenticate your clients on the clear without using passwords or just simple cookies.

What Facebook's HMAC-like scheme does is that they'll send a shared secret to you on HTTPS, in addition to just the open session key, when you login. Any FB Connect requests would have a session key, a sequence number, and an md5 hash of the whole requests appended to the session secret. Because nobody else knows the the session secret, the only person who can generate the correct md5 hash for that request is you. So even if an attacker can intercept e.g. a Facebook status update from HTTP, he wouldn't be able to change it or post something else to your wall later. The sequence number is there to prevent replay attacks so the attacker wouldn't be able to post the same message again.

revetkn• 16 years ago

RE: point 2, The Facebook Graph API (which will at some point deprecate the Old REST API) does not operate in this fashion. You receive an OAuth access token and pass it back to FB over HTTPS. Unlike the Old REST API, no MD5ing/secret key signing/etc. is required. And the sequence number passed to the Old REST API is _not_ there to prevent replay attacks - it simply needs to be a number larger than any of the previous messages' sequence numbers (as an attacker, I'd just pass in a very large value; in practice, everyone just passes the UNIX timestamp).

jacoblyles3• 16 years ago

Thank you for this information.

tszming• 16 years ago

I hope all browser makers should show a warning message when user submit a form contain the field "password", if that action is not protected by SSL.

natch• 16 years ago

Good to know. I'm out.

tlrobinson• 16 years ago

Guess what: unfortunately most websites do. If you share a password with a website that does, then game over.

bitanarch7• 16 years ago

I've been notified that Gowalla is also having the same problem - and unfortunately it's confirmed. I've uploaded another screenshot showing the same problem with Gowalla 2.2.1 on iPhone:

http://lh4.ggpht.com/_UrFI48Xbj8g/THD6IyfkCYI/AAAAAAAAALg/ZT...

Note that "Authorization: Basic" line - same problem with foursquare. If you're running the same procedures I outlined with Gowalla you'd see your own username:password right after the HTTP authorization line.

tswicegood• 16 years ago

Ok - so welcome to last year? I recall a PyCon talk on security a few years ago where one of the speaker's first slides was a list of passwords with the text "if this is your Twitter password, change it, then change your Twitter client."

Most of these startups treat the iPhone as if it were some magical device that's plugged straight into their API. I actually participated on a Get Satisfaction thread for Gowalla where one person claimed they liked that it was iPhone only (which dates how long ago it was) because it made it "secure" and couldn't be "hacked the way Foursquare can."

Needless to say, they were disabused of that notion pretty quickly when checked in at the Gug, the Apple flagship store in London, and my home within the space of 30 seconds. It literally took 3 minutes to figure out - most of which was spent setting up my iPhone to proxy through my laptop. They were (and keep in mind, this is back when Gowalla was still iPhone only) sending everything in clear text.

They also didn't regenerate session IDs for anything at the time. I logged out and logged back in, same session ID. I logged out via my iPhone, loaded up their site and changed my password, then logged back in, same session ID. Basically, once you had sniffed one session ID you were set. I tried it a week later and was still able to use the same session ID without any problem.

It's amazing that things like session hijacking are so unknown and unfamiliar to people people relying on web frameworks to do everything for them. At the time they were using Merb---I found out by hitting an "/unknown/and/unknowable/" page and seeing their backtrace output. Session hijacking is a solved problem, why they were subject to it I can't fathom.

st3fan• 16 years ago

Oh you don't want to know how many apps are doing this. People just have no idea.

I wish service providers would force app developers to use strong encrypted authentication channels.

Foursquare iPhone app sends passwords in plain text, don't use

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