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Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory

bugs.chromium.org

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Re: Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory

#141

Interesting. Cloudflare uses a lot of Go, which should hypothetically be memory safe. Was this system in Go? If so, I would be interested in seeing proof of concept code for a vulnerability like this.

It was a bug in C code (automatically generated by the Ragel state-machine compiler), some details are in CFs blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-memory-leak-c...

Re: Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory

#142
post #10

Neither this thread nor the Cloudflare blog post include concise steps for customers who were exposed. There's an argument for changing secrets (user passwords, API keys, etc.) for potentially affected sites, plus of course investigating logs for any anomalous activity. It would be nice if there were a guide for affected users, maybe a supplemental blog post. (and yet again: thank you Google for Project Zero!)

Right there with you. I'm currently scrambling for remediation ideas. "Change everything" isn't tractable.

Re: Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory

#144
post #81
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy this argument. A site using Flexible SSL is no less secure than one using http:// , and in fact is more secure, because nobody can MitM the connection between CloudFlare and the end user. The only thing vulnerable is the connection between the website and CloudFlare (~~and only to MitM, not to passive sniffing~~ EDIT: this isn't true, see [1]), but that's a much smaller and much better-protected surface a…

The only thing the end user has is the difference between http:// and https:// . Cloudflare undermines that entirely. How can a user possibly ever know whether it's safe to enter their credit card number or medical information in a web form, in a world where CloudFlare "Flexible SSL" exists?

"Cloudflare undermines that entirely. "

In their defense, this is a flaw of the whole SSL/TLS security model. I think even Google did that before Snowden, presented you with https:// urls but proxied everything in clear text (they claim they don't do it now). Still, you can be pretty sure that many https websites might pass traffic in clear text to their backends and not necessary take security even a little bit seriously.

Re: Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory

#145
post #66

Everyone: change your HN password asap!

Everyone: HN should implement U2F or TOTP so we don't need to only rely on passwords :(

How do i get the key information to HN without passing through cloudflare so that someone could sniff it?

Re: Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory

#146
post #103
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is secure. It's secure against the user being on an untrustworthy connection, it's secure against their ISP deciding to MitM their traffic, and it's also ~~secure against anyone passively sniffing the traffic between the website server and CloudFlare~~ (EDIT: No it's not, see [1]). The only thing it's not secure against is someone in a privileged network position who can MitM the connection between the website…

> it's also secure against anyone passively sniffing the traffic between the website server and CloudFlare How is it secure? CloudFlare allows you to send this traffic in the clear. If they required this traffic be HTTPS, that would be far better for web security.

My bad. I thought Flexible SSL was the option where you can use any arbitrary self-signed cert. But you're right, Flexible SSL means no encryption at all between the origin server and CloudFlare. I will edit my post accordingly.

Re: Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory

#147
People are going to lambast CF for downplaying the impact, and there could be merit in that.

However, I really want to say I am absolutely impressed with both Project Zero AND Cloudflare on so many fronts, from clarity of communication, to collaboration, and rapid response. So many other organizations would have absolutely tanked when presented with this problem. Huge kudos for CF guys understanding the severity and aligning resources to make the fixes.

In terms of P0 and Tavis though, holy crap. Where the heck would we be without these guys? Truly inspiring !

Re: Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory

#148
Cloudflare isn't just a security hole in the middle of the internet, they're a protection racket.

If you wanted to pay to DDoS a site, search for "booter" and you'll get a list of sites that will take another site off the internet for money with a flood of traffic.

quezstresser.com webstresser.co topbooter.co instabooter.com booter.xyz critical-boot.com top10booters.com betabooter.com databooter.com

etc. etc. - from the first 30 results I could find 2 booter sites that weren't hosted by Cloudflare.

But hey, pay Cloudflare and your site too can be safe from DDoS attacks...

Re: Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory

#149
> The greatest period of impact was from February 13 and February 18 with around 1 in every 3,300,000 HTTP requests through Cloudflare potentially resulting in memory leakage (that’s about 0.00003% of requests).

1) From the metrics I recalled when I interviewed there, and assuming the given probability is correct, that means a potential of 100k-200k paged with private data leaked every day.

2) What's the probably that a page is served to a cache engine? Not a clue. Let's assume 1/1000.

3) That puts a bound around a hundred leaked pages saved per day into caches.

4) Do the cache only provide the latest version of a page? I think most do but not all. Let's ignore that aspect.

5) What's the probably that a page contains private user information like auth tokens? Maybe 1/10?

6) So, that's 10 pages saved per day into the internet search caches.

7) That's on par with their announcement: "With the help of Google, Yahoo, Bing and others, we found 770 unique URIs that had been cached and which contained leaked memory. Those 770 unique URIs covered 161 unique domains." Well, not that we know for how long this was running.

8) Now, I don't want to downplay the issue, but leaking an dozen tokens per day is not that much of a disaster. Sure it's bad, but it's not remotely close to the leak of the millennia and it's certainly not internet scale leak.

9) For the record, CloudFlare serves over one BILLION human beings. Given the tone and the drama I expected way more data from this leak. This is a huge disappointment.

Happy Ending: You were probably not affected.

Re: Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory

#150
post #4

Oh, my god. Read the whole event log. If you were behind Cloudflare and it was proxying sensitive data (the contents of HTTP POSTs, &c), they've potentially been spraying it into caches all across the Internet; it was so bad that Tavis found it by accident just looking through Google search results. The crazy thing here is that the Project Zero people were joking last night about a disclosure that was going to keep e…

It is far from over, too! Google Cache still has loads of sensitive information, a link away! Look at this, click on the downward arrow, "Cached": https://www.google.com/search?q="CF-Host-Origin-IP:"+"author... (And then, in Google Cache, "view source", search for "authorization".) (Various combinations of HTTP headers to search for yield more results.)

Wow, I just tried this, the first result with a google cache copy has a bunch of the kind of data described. Although there was only one result with a cache.
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