Shameless plug, I’ve worked on identifying/characterizing these issues on cloud providers: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.05122.pdf
It’s only a matter of time before adversaries become more sophisticated at identifying and exploiting these in bulk.
When your paper came out some media articles made it sound like you invented the method, as you didn't bother to cite the original finder.
I know, academics don't like to cite "gray literature". But that's really not ok.
Our work isn’t fundamentally about just subdomain takeover, which has received substantial academic study (we cited multiple of these). Academic conference papers are highly space constrained, so it’s common to limit cites to seminal conference papers unless no such sources exist. In this case Liu et al. 2016 is the original academic cite and does cite the work you mention. The work you mention also specifically also deals with SaaS-related (not IP-related) subdomain takeover, which is a separate area that we don’t study in our work.
More high-level description here: https://pauley.me/post/2022/cloud-squatting/
The email rejection's tone is weird.
If it hadn't taken them almost a year and actual subdomain takeover to fix it, I might be inclined to believe them.
Maybe I’m just risk averse here. I assume most of big tech with more legal weight than they know what to do with have about a 50/50 chance of having someone upstairs greenlighting legal to throw a tantrum even if it’s not in anyone’s best interests.
Maybe if this firm demonstrated an exploit of CORS headers elsewhere open to *.microsoft.com or something, they’d be on worse footing legally.
Especially now that this has been on Hacker News, I don't think even Microsoft is stupid enough to go on the offensive over something like this. The bad press would be so much greater than anything they have to gain.
Well, previously I'd never heard of Truffle Security, but now I have. So ... maybe?
Microsoft has Safe Harbor.
It's a subdomain takeover, but not as we would normally think of it (getting access to the DNS settings and pointing them to what we want) but from getting "access" to the server the subdomain already points to.
These vulnerabilities are adding so much more fear to.life.
I just got done neutralizing lastpass. And that took a while. I started that back in September.
I don't like the idea of consolidation. It's a bad security posture. People love to point out that "they" can secure your data better than you can, but always neglect to mention that a consolidated target has considerably more value. Credential theft results in compromised networks. If you host your own passwords, an attacker would have to start with access in order to steal credentials. If you put all your passwords on a 3rd party server that you can't audit, with millions of other passwords from millions of other customers, it's only a matter of time before they get leaked. In fact, it's almost guaranteed that it will leak, because the value of the prize is millions of times greater.
Why would I waste 3 months trying to hack one business to harvest credentials when I can spend 12 months hacking last pass to get a million passwords? It's a simple cost/ benefit calculation. And lazy administration to think anything different.
So go ahead, consolidate your whole business on infra you have no real authority over. The next major world conflict will result in 4 cloud providers being physically attacked with data centers destroyed and then you will be partly to blame when 90% of the free world's economy disappears overnight.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190501000000*/http://cseo-cohe...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-has-a-subdomain-hija...
2019: Microsoft loses control over Windows Tiles subdomain
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-loses-control-over-w...
Also possible with A/AAAA records, if the IP becomes controlled by someone else, that's less likely if you're self hosted with IPs you were assigned directly by an IP registry, than if you're borrowing IPs from a service provider.
Now the CNAME is pointing to redirect-dns.msftdomains.com.
so bad.
https://nthitz.github.io/turndownforwhatjs/tdfw.js
Which plays a youtube video?
