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The diffirence is intent and/or gross negligence. Storing passwords in plain text in a database requires a gross lack of security mentality in both design stag

• zrobotics 8y ago
  How is this in any way better or more excusable? Calling it a 'minor oversight' could also apply to the DB being in plaintext. Storing passwords in a plaintext DB heppes in the same manner-a dev is lazy or ignorant of the security reprocussions. Which is what happened here; barring evidence this was done maliciously we can assume that this was accidental. But that doesn't make it any more excusable, since it should be clear that logs can also contain sensitive data that needs to be protected/anonymized. Considering how selective FB is for hiring, I would hope we could expect a higher standard.
  • glenneroo 8y ago
    Not to mention 200-600 million users had their passwords exposed for many years. That must be a massive trove of log files.
• lacey 8y ago
  You assume that storing passwords in plaintext is intent as opposed to gross negligence. In many past instances it’s been intentional and gross negligence because the people making all the design and implementation choices were not knowledgeable about best practices.
• Aeolun 8y ago
  I see this differently. If someone stores passwords in plaintext in the database, they’re idiots that don’t know any better. If someone logs your password in plaintext but has it encrypted in the database that’s grossly negligent.
• wrs 8y ago
  Yes. Consider this not-unlikely scenario: The people who implemented the logging did it as a feature of a generic API proxy (there’s no way Facebook implements logging separately for each of their bazillion services!), and no doubt put in a provison for masking sensitive data. They tested it and it worked fine. Then some devs miles and years away didn’t use that feature properly and accidentally failed to not log passwords in an incoming request. They may not even have been looking at those request logs because that’s not the request they were testing. Then that feature went into production and this oversight was magnified millions of times. At large scale you don’t just tail the production log firehose and look for stuff. You have to search for specifics to find anything st all. So if nobody was debugging this thing in production it’s quite plausible nobody saw the passwords in the log. One way to catch this sort of thing is sentinel data — in this case, have a unique value for a test account’s password and test every service with it, then search everywhere you can think of for that value.
  • grahn 8y ago
    So here is the thing: It was presumably relatively easy for you to come up with that scenario, which you called "not-unlikely". Then what you do is you put that scenario into your risk analysis when you're designing the authentication architecture, and figure out mitigations to make sure that particular mistake becomes (very) unlikely. The notion that "it could easily happen" that is being brought up throughout this thread should really only suggests that people aren't doing even rudimentary security assessments (or, hopefully, they're not working with security sensitive software). If you can't solve it technically, you solve it through processes and training. Same goes for any other industry -- if a construction worker said that it's just one bad morning away from dropping a two tonne girder on a playground, we would never accept that. Or a pilot crashing an airliner into the waiting hall when they're supposed to land. Somehow it seems that large parts of the software industry simply hasn't reached the level of maturity we expect from pretty much all other industries. Facebook is an enormous company. They should be able to have entire departments working on these topics. It's not a one-person hobby project we're talking about.
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