Audit Cleared Google Privacy Practices Despite Security Flaw

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/410568-exclusive-privacy-audit-failed-to-mention-of-google-plus-security-flaw

by infodocket • 8 years ago

35 19 8 years ago

thehill.com

Leace2• 8 years ago

Ernst & Young also give a positive audit to Startssl/Wosign even though they had problems at the time.

For that reason Mozilla "no longer accept audits carried out by Ernst & Young Hong Kong." [0].

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2016/10/24/distrusting-new...

bsder• 8 years ago

To be fair, I have never seen an external security audit do anything useful.

Either they bend to the folks paying the bills, or they flag a zillion, generally known to engineers, issues.

If you really want to make you security audit useless, hand the auditors C code. They will stare at you as though you just handed them the head of a small child.

mahemm2• 8 years ago

I have personally been a part of security audits that have found critical vulnerabilities in some of the best-known tech companies on the globe.

Just because there exists a world of auditors who function as rubber stamps does not mean we all do.

esoterae• 8 years ago

This is a witch-hunt by Murdoch, I'm guessing. 500,000 people's information with the potential to have leaked, and yet Facebook and Equifax fucking skate on DEMONSTRABLY having leaked well over half of America's personal information to domestic and foreign interests alike.

This is sour grapes of the worst kind.

SpicyLemonZest• 8 years ago

I mean, what is it at this point, 2 days of bad press? All Murdoch properties I'm aware of covered Facebook and Equifax for a lot longer than that, and certainly didn't pretend that what they did was okay.

partiallypro• 8 years ago

...Can you show proof that Murdoch properties didn't cover Facebook and Equifax breaches?

(hint: you can't, because they covered them extensively)

glenrivard• 8 years ago

Agree. When did Murdoch start with his vendetta towards Google?

kevingadd3• 8 years ago

It's only a 'potential' because they failed to keep any auditable logs of the behavior of unvetted third parties, AND failed to vet them in any meaningful fashion.

The amount and type of data exposed isn't as bad but this is pretty similar to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, except in this case Google literally didn't even notice. Facebook at least noticed.

tptacek3• 8 years ago

This story doesn't make any sense. An FTC-mandated E&Y "Privacy Audit" isn't a software security assessment and would never have been expected to either (a) uncover subtle application security flaws or (b) metabolize internal reports of subtle, fixed flaws. Nor, for that matter, is the internal discovery of a software security flaw a "breach": routine internal discovery of vulnerabilities is what good security teams do.

The reporting on this G+ story has been startlingly bad. There's apparently some juice to the narrative that Google is running headlong into a collision with the Trump administration, and so reporters seem to be starting with a public policy conclusion and working their way back. Somebody needs to start informing these people how professional software security works.

In any audit situation --- PCI, HITECH, SOC-2, you name it --- there is neither a norm nor a duty to notify auditors of internally discovered security problems. Nor would any such norm be productive: it would warp internal incentives, both to discover and to properly handle vulnerabilities.

If the auditors discover a security problem, that problem gets documented, just like it (typically) does with external reporters (researchers, bug bounty claimants). When that happens, you have an indication that your internal software security controls failed. But when your team finds a bug in its own code? That's a sign that the team is doing things right.

kevingadd3• 8 years ago

All of your characterization here is correct, but does it really make sense to classify it as an internally discovered security problem instead of a potential-or-real-breach when it was present for years, trivially exploitable by third parties, and is impossible to vet? There's no way to know whether or not it was used because there was no logging in place for third-party use of user data, and apparently no audits (manual or automated) were ever performed of these APIs. Google more or less admitted that all they had to go on here was an examination of the third parties who potentially had access to the data, because they have no way to know what they actually did with it and apparently can't contact them to find out.

The reporting is definitely exaggerating the significance of the data that was exposed and making it sound like it's known that the data was collected by third parties, but it's absolutely the case that the ball was dropped here and it's inappropriate to pretend nothing happened. There's simply no way to know, which is itself a breach of user trust.

It's kind of a no-win situation here given the way the media reports on these matters, but attempting to keep it quiet was incredibly foolish - everything remotely bad that happens at Google is going to get leaked by internal troublemakers now, and legal/pr should know that and should have gotten ahead of this.

tptacek3• 8 years ago

There is nothing remarkable about finding a vulnerability that had been latent in a codebase for years. It is not clear to me what "ball" you believe has been "dropped" here. If it's that the first N groups of security testers that looked at this code missed the vulnerability that their N+1th found, sorry, no: that happens all the time.

UncleMeat2• 8 years ago

but does it really make sense to classify it as an internally discovered security problem instead of a potential-or-real-breach

Literally all security bugs can be described this way. "Company closes security bug" is not really news, nor should it be. How many XSS bugs have been closed at your place of business? Those are literally all potential breaches. Should each one of those get published in the news? Or does this requirement only exist for the major companies?

I'd wager that FAANG companies are closing thousands of similar bugs annually. The only reason this one is treated differently is the chosen narrative by the journalists.

Audit Cleared Google Privacy Practices Despite Security Flaw

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