gibsonsecurity

They won't see a huge amount of users deleting accounts, but I'm sure future users will think twice before joining.

Also, the value of the company.

This isn't an issue with convenience, this is an issue with Snapchat failing to fix a vulnerability.

How relevant is find_friends to Snapchat now? Is it really needed? Are they getting that many users building relationships for it? Is it worth damaging Snapchats image?

We're going to be releasing a statement shortly.

Here: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8231005

For the record we don't know about SnapchatDB.

But it was a matter of time until this happened, the exploit still works with minor modifications, you just have to be smart about it.

We don't :) (but we'd be happy to take Snapchats money and help them out!)

We documented two exploits, which are exploits, because we are exploiting code that has been incorrectly implemented.

We also noted that Snapchat must have lied to Goldman Sachs (is this what you were referring to?), as we noticed during our research that there is no mention of gender in the protocol.

Does that answer any questions?

Sorry about that - I thought it was clear from the context of those off-the-cuff estimations that it was 6666 numbers (since that was based off of how many numbers you could scan, not users). We've added some clarification just to be sure, thanks.

He isn't?

Sorry that really is a mistake on my part. I thought I saw his name attached to it. I'm probably thinking of someone else, again I apologize to all parties involved.

Obvious privacy reasons that would probably get Snapchat sued, but otherwise, yes that would probably work.

We thought about that, and it would be pretty misleading. If they did find out data that way, they should really tell people how inaccurate it can be.

Definitely, lol.

That's a pretty sneaky idea, I'm sure its possible with all the clients now available!

Hahahaha, I don't think making it harder to reverse would be any better, it would probably motivate people even more (deobfuscation is too much fun and fairly easy!).

They should really just focus on improving what they have and pushing clients towards a safer protocol slowly.

Snaps being stolen will always happen, but I do like the approach Instagram took to preventing spammers (getInstagramString(), it stopped everyone until they adapted!).

I'm quite the fan of Steve Gibson, infact I use grsec on my boxes, sadly we only noticed this after our initial release, when it really was too late.

If Steve Gibson hears of this, or reads this, my apologies, this was not intended.

(also this was a reference to the movie Hackers, which in turn a reference to William Gibson)

Thanks, and that's totally fine. I agree with you, Snapchats definitely flawed from the start, but as long as we get rid of gaping holes in their security such as the find_friends exploit, at least they're halfway there.

(OT, but you have a really cool project list btw :P)

Hi, I'm one of the authors of the above release [1], and the exploit we primarily talked about (find_friends) isn't really an issue with the protocol as a whole.

We understand the need to support legacy clients, but Snapchat could easily limit the damage this exploit could do.

It wouldn't be that hard for them to make the best of what they have, by auditing all the code that typically has these exploits, and from that point onwards, also auditing riskier areas in the code base periodically.

But yeah, we have seen an improvement in some of the Snapchat client code, which indicates there are probably some bright new developers that have just joined the team. We just find it pretty bad that in this time, we haven't seen attempts (on our end, server side may be different) to secure the protocol.

Also regarding communication, we haven't heard a word from Snapchat in 4 months, neither has the reporter of this story, Violet Blue. If any of the guys from Snapchat are reading this (or you can pass on a message), tell them they're free to message us at security@gibsonsec.org.

We're pretty easy to contact. [1]: http://gibsonsec.org/snapchat/fulldisclosure/

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Just saw your edit, the purpose of this release wasn't to tell everyone we're the nth person to reverse engineer Snapchats protocol, but rather to bring attention to the particular vulnerabilities.

I can speak for the rest of our team, and we're pretty sick of Snapchats protocol, and this will most likely be our last release regarding it.

(Also I noticed newlines broke, kinda fixed that)