3 ms·

Seems a little.... arbitrary....? Don't people who run bug bounties publish their reward structure beforehand?

by growse 13y ago

jonknee 13y ago
Yes, they did. This was not the goal of the bounty, but was still a serious issue. They couldn't give away the prize for the contest and instead decided on a still quite generous $100,000. http://telegram.org/crypto_contest http://telegram.org/crypto_contest
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  This was not the goal of the bounty, but was still a serious issue. To be clear, this bug was enough to compromise the security of every Telegram secret chat session. I can't think of a more serious issue.
  - bhitov 13y ago
    Vulnerability to passive attacks is worse than vulnerability to active attacks. I'm not downplaying the severity of a MITM vulnerability, but certainly there could exist more serious issues.
  - makomk 13y ago
    Yeah. In essence, it made their nominally end-to-end encrypted secret chat feature no more secure than simply giving the Telegram server operators a plaintext copy of every message you sent and trusting them not to log, read or tamper with it. Worse, it's the kind of flaw you'd expect someone subtly sabotaging the protocol to create. It's a small, superficially plausible modification that turns an apparently secure scheme into something completely broken. Yet if they'd made that modification in the obvious way - by combining the nonce and Diffie-Hellman result with a secure hash function - it wouldn't have caused the problem; for the vulnerability to exist the nonce has to be handled in a very particular way.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
adambenayoun 13y ago
Other people claimed that the Telegram team might find that bug to be outside of the scope of their bounty contest, so $100k is better than nothing (and to be frank I'm quite surprised they were _that_ generous). But you're right - they should have a clear reward structure.

Seems a little.... arbitrary....? Don't people who run bug bounties publish their reward structure beforehand?

by growse 13y ago

Seems a little.... arbitrary....? Don't people who run bug bounties publish their reward structure beforehand?

Yes, they did. This was not the goal of the bounty, but was still a serious issue. They couldn't give away the prize for the contest and instead decided on a still quite generous $100,000. http://telegram.org/crypto_contest http://telegram.org/crypto_contest

sillysaurus2 13y ago
This was not the goal of the bounty, but was still a serious issue. To be clear, this bug was enough to compromise the security of every Telegram secret chat session. I can't think of a more serious issue.
- bhitov 13y ago
  Vulnerability to passive attacks is worse than vulnerability to active attacks. I'm not downplaying the severity of a MITM vulnerability, but certainly there could exist more serious issues.
- makomk 13y ago
  Yeah. In essence, it made their nominally end-to-end encrypted secret chat feature no more secure than simply giving the Telegram server operators a plaintext copy of every message you sent and trusting them not to log, read or tamper with it. Worse, it's the kind of flaw you'd expect someone subtly sabotaging the protocol to create. It's a small, superficially plausible modification that turns an apparently secure scheme into something completely broken. Yet if they'd made that modification in the obvious way - by combining the nonce and Diffie-Hellman result with a secure hash function - it wouldn't have caused the problem; for the vulnerability to exist the nonce has to be handled in a very particular way.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

adambenayoun 13y ago

Other people claimed that the Telegram team might find that bug to be outside of the scope of their bounty contest, so $100k is better than nothing (and to be frank I'm quite surprised they were _that_ generous). But you're right - they should have a clear reward structure.