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Zero Day

Ryan Naraine, Emil Protalinski and Dancho Danchev

Google downplays severity of Gmail CSRF flaw

By | March 4, 2009, 2:44pm PST

Summary: Yesterday, Vicente Aguilera Diaz from Internet Security Auditors released proof of concept of a CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) vulnerability in Google’s Gmail, which he originally communicated to Google two years ago. The CSRF flaw affects Gmail’s “Change Password” function, since according to Diaz the session cookie is automatically sent by the browser in every request [...]

Yesterday, Vicente Aguilera Diaz from Internet Security Auditors released proof of concept of a CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) vulnerability in Google’s Gmail, which he originally communicated to Google two years ago. The CSRF flaw affects Gmail’s “Change Password” function, since according to Diaz the session cookie is automatically sent by the browser in every request making the attack possible.

Google’s response came fast, and it’s in the form of - “We do not consider this case to be a significant vulnerability.” :

We’ve been aware of this report for some time, and we do not consider this case to be a significant vulnerability, since a successful exploit would require correctly guessing a user’s password within the period that the user is visiting a potential attacker’s site,” the spokesperson said. “Despite  the very low chance of guessing a password in this way, we will explore ways to further mitigate the issue. We always encourage users to choose strong passwords, and we have an indicator to help them do this.

Compared to the futile password guessing attempts in order to execute the attack, nothing can replace flaw-independent approaches like social engineering. From a pragmatic perspective, malicious attackers have an extensive number of tactics to chose from if they were trying to obtain your Gmail password. Starting from plain simple phishing campaigns, and going to a more efficiency-centered approaches - remember the G-Archiver fiasco?

Google’s most recently fixed flaws across its web properties include October 2008’s cross domain frame injection vulnerability, November 2008’s XSS in Google’s accounts SSL login page, and January 2009’s Google sites reflective cross-site scripting flaw.

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Dancho Danchev is an independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, with extensive experience in open source intelligence gathering, malware and cybercrime incident response.

Disclosure

Dancho Danchev

More details on Dancho Danchev's current and past professional affiliations, can be found in his LinkedIn profile.

Biography

Dancho Danchev

Dancho Danchev is an independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, with extensive experience in open source intelligence gathering, and cybercrime incident response. He's been an active security blogger since 2007, and maintains a popular security blog sharing real-time threats intelligence data with the rest of the community on a daily basis. More details on Dancho Danchev's current and past professional affiliations, can be found in his LinkedIn profile. You can also follow him on Twitter
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RE: Google downplays severity of Gmail CSRF flaw
birumut Updated - 3rd May 2011
Well done! Thank you very much for professional templates and community edition
seslisohbet seslichat
0 Votes
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Only a fool uses this...
Christian_<>< 4th Mar 2009
Fools spew all private data in google, online blog things are waiting for hackers to get the data.

Not only that google is big brother 2.0 on steroids, stores private data in which it is theirs to do with what they please.

Wait until these fools have their data exploited, see how willing they are to put their pictures all over a public domain with no rules. The internet is full of hackers from China, Russia, Middle East and of course Africa. Enjoy and having your identity stolen and then crying about why did it happen to me... alas lost sheep, install all google desktop searching, face books, keep blasting your data out there, people will use it to make money and they are not your 'friends' and the net is not user friendly...
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It's ME culture
Col Mustard 4th Mar 2009
So true it_wk. I think it is part of that culture (like hollywood) that feels justified, important, having worth or relevance when they see themselves presented to the public. Their live are so small it is the only thing that matters to them.
0 Votes
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ROFL
theoxygenthief 5th Mar 2009
I love your paranoia, and I love the fact that you feel the hackers from
Africa and the Middle East deserve mention but not the hackers from
Europe and the US...

I bet you buy stuff online all the time. Yet the fact that Facebook knows
where you went to school and google knows who you last emailed is
what freaks you out?
0 Votes
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It might be because hackers from Europe and the US
GuidingLight Updated - 5th Mar 2009
do stand the chance of being tracked down, and punished accordinglly.

Do you think the hackers from African and the Middle Easter nations have these same worries to contend with?
0 Votes
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Paranoia
theoxygenthief 6th Mar 2009
I think the chances of ANY hackers being tracked down and persecuted
are slim to none, especially those worth worrying about. I think the
amount of hackers in Africa and the Middle East don't even represent a
100th of the amount of hackers in the US and Europe.
Get over it! Long before Google or Facebook, your records were for sale. You didn't need the Internet for that, we had the credit agencies and information brokers building profiles a lot more dangerous than anything from these sites. Stop being such a sissy!
who use a certain product or products are narcissistic fools have been published, perhaps we can return to the subject at hand, which is the severity of the CSRF flaw in Gmail. Admittedly, posting on that matter would require more knowledge and allow for less venting, but perhaps this is not too much to ask of readers of this particular blog ?...

Henri
0 Votes
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Waaaay too much to ask
theoxygenthief 5th Mar 2009
These forums exist solely for the purposes of ranting and raving in a
vacuum of knowledge. Abandon all hope of rational conversation all ye
who enter here
0 Votes
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Insert obligatory rant here
daniel.crompton@... 5th Mar 2009
I saw the BlackHat Briefing on New Techniques for Defeating SSL, Moxie talked about the possibilities of harvesting GMail accounts via Tor, or controlled network. After hearing that CSRF is just icing on the cake.
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Why webmail?
JDThompson 6th Mar 2009
So, what is it about web mail that people like? You can access your gmail account via POP3 or IMAP, with TLS and SSL encryption of the whole session. What's not to like?
0 Votes
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RE: Google downplays severity of Gmail CSRF flaw
birumut Updated - 3rd May 2011
Well done! Thank you very much for professional templates and community edition
seslisohbet seslichat

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