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Doesn't stealing the cookies/token require a non-HTTP-only session cookie or a token in localstorage? Do you know that Discord puts their secrets in one of tho
by jdsleppy 11mo ago
Doesn't stealing the cookies/token require a non-HTTP-only session cookie or a token in localstorage? Do you know that Discord puts their secrets in one of those insecure places, or was it just a guess?
I believe if you always keep session cookies in secure, HTTP-only cookies, then you are more resilient to this attack.
I interviewed frontend devs last year and was shocked how few knew about this stuff.
- s_ting765 11mo agoYou may be thinking of CSRF mitigations. XSS exploits are more dangerous and can do more than steal sessions.
- ddlsmurf 11mo agoif you set the cookier header right (definitely not always the case), this is true, but the javascript can still send requests that will have that cookie included, effectively still letting the hacker use the session as the logged in user
- collinmanderson 11mo agowith http-only they can't _steal_ the cookie, but they can still _use_ the cookie. It reduces the impact but doesn't fully solve it.
- notnullorvoid 11mo agoIn general if a script can run, users sessions and more importantly passwords are at risk. It's true that an HTTP-only session cookie couldn't be directly taken, but it's trivial to present the user with a login screen and collect their password (and OTP), at which point you can easily get a session remotely. It can look entirely like the regular login page right down to the url path (because the script can modify that without causing a page load).
- drewvlaz 11mo agoWow did not realize a url could be set like that without promoting a page reload...
- notnullorvoid 11mo agoTo be clear only the path and query parameters part of the url can change, the domain (or sub domain) stays intact.
- sdf456 11mo agoEven scarier to me than the vulnerability is that Fidelity (whom I personally think is a good bank and investment company) was using a third party that allowed injection that could potentially steal a whole lot of money, affect markets, ruin or terminate billions of lives, and affect the course of humanity. What the fuck.
- 9rx 11mo agoIf it weren't already in the same domain you wouldn't be able to read a non-HttpOnly cookie anyway, so that's moot.
- psnehanshu 11mo agoWell that's how SPAs work (single page applications)
- jonfw 11mo agoHow do you modify the url exactly?
- eloisius 11mo agohttps://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History/pushState https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History/pus...
- notnullorvoid 11mo ago`history.replaceState(null, "", "/login")`
- rvnx 11mo agoFor Coinbase docs, this is a disaster particularly
- notnullorvoid 11mo agoBy they looks of it their docs are under a subdomain, and no part of the domain can be changed when setting the url this way. So it would still look a little out of place at least.
- brianxq3 11mo agoI mean, you're not wrong, but this is going to trick a non-zero number of people and that's not okay. We should expect more out of companies like Coinbase and hold them to a high standard. This is unacceptable and the amount offered in general is low. It feels like we can agree on this.
- Maxion 11mo agoauth URLs are almost always a shitshow in every larger corp. Having the url be https://docs.bigcorp.com/sso/authlayerv1/us-east-24/aws/secure/login?si=QmFzZTY0&a=24&b=23 https://docs.bigcorp.com/sso/authlayerv1/us-east-24/aws/secu... would not stand out at all to anyone.
- socketcluster 11mo agoYep, httpOnly cookies just give the hacker a bit of extra work in some situations. TBH I don't even think httpOnly is worth the hassle it creates for platform developers given how little security it adds.
- hackermondev 11mo agoDiscord puts the authentication token in local storage
- edoceo 11mo agoIs that a problem on its own? It's like, encrypted right? Maybe a time sensitive token?
- seangrogg 11mo agoDepends on the token; JWTs usually have payloads that are only base64 encoded. As well, if there's a refresh token in there it can be used to generate more tokens until invalidated (assuming invalidation is built in).
- socketcluster 11mo agoNot a problem in itself. Also, there's not much point of encrypting tokens. The attacker could use the encrypted token to authenticate themselves without having to decrypt. They could just make a request from the victim's own browser. They could do this with cookies too even with httpOnly cookies. XSS is a big problem. If a hacker can inject a script into your front end and make it execute, it's game over. Once they get to that point, there's an infinite number of things they can do. They basically own the user's account.
- arethuza 11mo agoDoes anyone actually encrypt the contents of JWTs? I'd have thought that anyone who has concerns about the contents of the token being easily visible would be likely to avoid JWTs anyway and just use completely opaque tokens?
- kbolino 11mo agoEncrypted tokens are opaque but they are also offline-verifiable. A simple opaque token has to be verified online (typically, against a database) whenever it's used. Auth0, for example, supports JWE for its access tokens: https://auth0.com/docs/secure/tokens/access-tokens/json-web-encryption https://auth0.com/docs/secure/tokens/access-tokens/json-web-...
- abustamam 11mo agoAs a FE dev, I wouldn't be able to articulate what you just did in the way you did, but it is something I know in practice, just from experience. I don't think any of the FE courses I took tackled anything like that.
- selfmodruntime 11mo agoToken stealing hasn't been a real danger for a decade now. If you don't mark your token's as non-HTTP you're doing something explicitely wrong, because 99% of backends nowadays do this for you.
- collinmanderson 11mo agowith http-only they can't _steal_ the cookie, but they can still _use_ the cookie. It reduces the impact but doesn't fully solve it.
- netdevphoenix 11mo agoSurely, if a script is in a position to sniff the cookie from local storage, they can also indirectly use the http-only cookie by making a request from the browser. So really not much of a difference as they will be taking over the account
- Aldipower 11mo agoThe cookie storage and the local storage by all means is not the same! Cookies are not stored in the local storage and could be httpOnly, so they are not directly accessible by JavaScript. Nevertheless, as described above, with this XSS attack it is easy to bypass the token and just steal the user credentials by pretending a fresh login mask keeping the origin domain intact. That's why XSS attacks are dangerous since existence. Nothing new actually.
- z3t4 11mo agohttps://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Headers/Set-Cookie#httponly https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
- giancarlostoro 11mo agoNo because Discord auth tokens dont expire soon enough. The only thing that kills them is changing your password. Idk why Discord doesnt invalidate them after some time, it is seriously amateur hour over there and has been for a while.
- seaal 11mo agoProbably because the end user hates login in, my friends always complain about the “remember me” button being useless for some services.
- giancarlostoro 11mo agoNo, these are tokens that you get a new one per request, if you open up dev tools, and open the user settings panel, you will see that you get a new one every single time you open the user settings panel. They never expire, at least for years they were insanely long lasting.