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Sounds like an access control failure here, leading to users being able to access other users' recorded consultations. Babylon claims that this is due to a new
by g_p 6y ago
Sounds like an access control failure here, leading to users being able to access other users' recorded consultations. Babylon claims that this is due to a new feature letting people switch between audio and video in the call, but this seems a somewhat strange claim.
It sounds more to me like an access control/authentication failure - firstly on listing recordings that belong to another user, secondly on then giving access to those recordings when requested. And arguably also a failure in storing the recordings in an effective "plaintext" meaning they could be retrieved by a user that shouldn't have access - given this is about as sensitive health-related PII as you can get, I'd argue these recordings ought to be encrypted with a per-recording key available from a separate key management system?
I guess this gives rise to a bigger question around whether online GP consultations should be recorded and preserved like this, given this kind of situation was/should be clearly in the threat model, and will be from now on?
Edit to add: From Babylon's website, "All data is encrypted and stored securely to guarantee your privacy" - once again, "non end-to-end encryption" fails to save the day due to a failure of another component of the system, and becomes snake-oil marketing copy.
- save_ferris 6y ago> It sounds more to me like an access control/authentication failure - firstly on listing recordings that belong to another user, secondly on then giving access to those recordings when requested. Yep, I agree. Perusing their careers page, I can see they use ruby and java. It’s so easy to misconfigure resource authorization in a rails app, which is why it’s so important to have solid testing around those components of an app. > I guess this gives rise to a bigger question around whether online GP consultations should be recorded and preserved like this I also completely agree here. EMR systems are well established at this point and doctors have somehow gotten this far without needing full recordings of most consultations. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were developing an abridgment system that automatically creates notes for doctors or something, but like you said, storing that training data is such a huge risk.