>Microsoft had editorial control over this post, cutting sections and figures and reshaping how the impact is described before publication.
that is... not great. shame on microsoft.
its actions like that which shed light on why we get the nighmare eclipses of the world. pressuring a kid into handing over full editorial control of a disclosure is gross.
It's a little perplexing. Of course it's always a controversial topic since it's difficult to value an exploit, but whenever we read about these online, which probably goes through some survivorship bias, they seem pretty low.
As I understand it, bug bounty awards are a rough proxy for "would nation-state actors be able to exploit this for operational purposes without getting caught".
Zero-click iPhone exploits that affect the current OS and also previous ones are worth hundreds of thousands.
There is an internal library at Microsoft that reliably avoids all these JWT problems - Microsoft Identity Service Essentials (MISE). Adopting MISE and upgrading to the latest versions of it have been part of the Secure Future Initiative (SFI) that can be read about in the news of previous years. Unfortunately it sounds like the service team intentionally deferred the compliance alerts they will have received.
There is so much work to do for SFI that is still being ignored. The only way that some of these services will update is by being the target of the red team, security researcher, or threat actor.
That being said, just last night I observed that the identity team is now opening up agent-assisted PRs against individual service team repos to force MISE adoption and upgrade to the latest version and best practices.
I think that's a great thing because many individual service teams simply lack the bandwidth or knowledge. Prior to GenAI availability I wasted many cycles on this kind of work. While GenAI made it easier - internal source documentation still does not unambiguously address every use case. So having the identity team drive this now with the help of agent sessions initiated by them is great.
> Hey! I’m Faav. A little over a year ago, when I was 15, I published Break into any Microsoft building: Leaking PII in Microsoft Guest Check-In, my first Microsoft write-up. I’m 16 now, and this one is a little bigger.
Damn, these guys got schooled by a 15 year old! Say less...
Argh, I missed that it actually uses the "none" algorithm. Yeah, the existence of that option is extremely dumb and it shouldn't be possible to use that. I misread the post and thought it was a regular JWT, but they simply didn't validate it.
Does this extend to OIDC? I’m not knowledgeable on the topic but it uses JWT right? Is it also prone to poor implementation? If you just error on alg=none does that solve it?
Other commenters are suggesting you can’t blame the spec for end implementation mistakes, except that’s one of the many issues - JWT being so error-prone is a problem.
I use JWT just for handling of tokens, because it’s so well supported, but I won’t use it for anything more than token storage _because_ it is so vulnerable to mistakes.
The fact that mistakes are so easy to make is indicative of poor design in the spec itself.
This is a pretty typical example of the security posture of microsoft, and yet people continually buy their arguments that open-source and therefore auditable alternatives are inherently less secure than their "trust me bro"
> Two quick notes first. The impact I describe is hypothetical. It’s what an attacker could have done with this access, but luckily I found the bug instead, reported it, and never touched any customer data or PII.
I am the last person to judge someone for using AI to help them write a blog post, but what I wonder is: Do people not read what the AI produces before putting their name on it, or is the AI writing style not obvious to some people, or do they just not care that it's obviously AI and bad style?
It's not a "normal" sentence and is quite clearly produced by an LLM, it's a typical Claudeism so probably that. The entire post is also flagged by Pangram, so OP is correct.
Prefixing saying something with "Two quick notes first" is extremely common AI meta commentary. You may be right that it is something Microsoft insisted he put at the top, which would also explain the weird style.
that is... not great. shame on microsoft.
its actions like that which shed light on why we get the nighmare eclipses of the world. pressuring a kid into handing over full editorial control of a disclosure is gross.
e.g. The $5000? Amnesty from being sued?
It's a little perplexing. Of course it's always a controversial topic since it's difficult to value an exploit, but whenever we read about these online, which probably goes through some survivorship bias, they seem pretty low.
On https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/bounty it seems the top is $100,000 or $250,000 depending which program this counts under.
What does HN think? Why would it be only $5000?
Zero-click iPhone exploits that affect the current OS and also previous ones are worth hundreds of thousands.
3.85 billion is actually closer to a "penny" for Microsoft.
https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar25/index.html
That being said, just last night I observed that the identity team is now opening up agent-assisted PRs against individual service team repos to force MISE adoption and upgrade to the latest version and best practices. I think that's a great thing because many individual service teams simply lack the bandwidth or knowledge. Prior to GenAI availability I wasted many cycles on this kind of work. While GenAI made it easier - internal source documentation still does not unambiguously address every use case. So having the identity team drive this now with the help of agent sessions initiated by them is great.
I don't know how this ever became a thing that was allowed into the spec and then picked from the spec and implemented in various implementations.
https://www.howmanydayssinceajwtalgnonevuln.com/
Complexity is a spec failure in security issues.
It's that simple.
I use JWT just for handling of tokens, because it’s so well supported, but I won’t use it for anything more than token storage _because_ it is so vulnerable to mistakes.
The fact that mistakes are so easy to make is indicative of poor design in the spec itself.
UPD: It's his personal bot.
I am the last person to judge someone for using AI to help them write a blog post, but what I wonder is: Do people not read what the AI produces before putting their name on it, or is the AI writing style not obvious to some people, or do they just not care that it's obviously AI and bad style?
Did you give the article a once-over beyond that? It’s one of the decidedly not-AI lines.