3 ms·

A thought experiment for the large minds here: how long a string _would_ be sufficient? I wonder if any string is long enough if you don't also implement some s

by gcanyon 17y ago

A thought experiment for the large minds here: how long a string _would_ be sufficient? I wonder if any string is long enough if you don't also implement some sort of access control lockdown to prevent people poking your system endlessly, but what do you think?

alecco 17y ago
Security and privacy shouldn't be based on hiding a plaintext string. What about the ISPs, browser history, and other leakage. S3 hosting of private images was a terrible idea. It doesn't provide any kind of protection.
- Terretta 17y ago
  > S3 ... doesn't provide any kind of protection. S3 offers privacy protections with the ability to require an expiring token in the URL. The theory is the web site should authenticate a user, and only generate a valid token for that user (for a fuzzy definition of "that" user) that works only for a limited time.
deleted 17y ago
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xsmasher 17y ago
Assuming we're assuming SSL, then a string in the URL could be more secure than a password because it could be longer than a human could comfortably remember. Longer = harder to brute force, plus you can block (or teergrube, or whatever) any IP's that try to guess a URL and fail. You can add an option to delete/rekey the image too. At that point the URL is exactly as secure as the method you use to send the URL -- just like a password.
jeff18 17y ago
Adding a single character to the length (from five to six) would probably have been enough to keep them off the radar by making it dramatically harder to bruteforce. I would not be surprised if this single extra character would have completely diverted the attack, since the miss rate would be so high, it would trigger S3's DoS protection. Doubling the characters to 10 would pretty much completely solve the problem. It would take many, many years to find a single image. Far below the threshold where Amazon S3 would ban you.

by gcanyon 17y ago

alecco 17y ago

Security and privacy shouldn't be based on hiding a plaintext string. What about the ISPs, browser history, and other leakage. S3 hosting of private images was a terrible idea. It doesn't provide any kind of protection.

Terretta 17y ago
> S3 ... doesn't provide any kind of protection. S3 offers privacy protections with the ability to require an expiring token in the URL. The theory is the web site should authenticate a user, and only generate a valid token for that user (for a fuzzy definition of "that" user) that works only for a limited time.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

xsmasher 17y ago

Assuming we're assuming SSL, then a string in the URL could be more secure than a password because it could be longer than a human could comfortably remember. Longer = harder to brute force, plus you can block (or teergrube, or whatever) any IP's that try to guess a URL and fail. You can add an option to delete/rekey the image too. At that point the URL is exactly as secure as the method you use to send the URL -- just like a password.

jeff18 17y ago

Adding a single character to the length (from five to six) would probably have been enough to keep them off the radar by making it dramatically harder to bruteforce. I would not be surprised if this single extra character would have completely diverted the attack, since the miss rate would be so high, it would trigger S3's DoS protection. Doubling the characters to 10 would pretty much completely solve the problem. It would take many, many years to find a single image. Far below the threshold where Amazon S3 would ban you.