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‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems

krebsonsecurity.com

91–100 of 247 posts

Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems

#91

It's 1985 all over again: I'm in my bedroom running a ProDOS wardialer on my 300/1200 baud AppleModem; I have found zero computers, but it is fun watching the numbers flick past, hoping that I, too, can discover a WOPR and start global thermonuclear war.

>It's 1985 all over again

i think it is even earlier than that:

>Each Zoom conference call is assigned a Meeting ID that consists of 9 to 11 digits.

8 char passwd and 16 digit credit cards came way before 1985.

Never mind, i have committed in memory our daily scrum 9 digit pin code :) Very convenient. And if somebody else were to dial in uninvited into our scrum ... well, it is at their own peril as it carries (especially for a person not hardened by a long tenure at a BigCo) the risk of brain damage, loss of ability to perceive reality as it is, spontaneous suicidal desire, etc.

Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems

#92
post #34

Zoom is pretty lucky to get so much free security scrutiny. I hope they make the most of it and fix all of these issues..

Three of the big issues reported in the past week have also been corrected in the past week, so they’re certainly trying.

Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems

#93
post #71
post #68

I always wondered why teleconferencing systems don't incorporate a workflow where people connecting in need an approval from the organizer before actually entering the meeting.

Most do, but in Zoom it’s off by default. (Waiting room)

And it’s a responsibility/pain for the facilitator when it’s on. Often they‘ll be caught up in the meeting and leave anyone who arrived 3 minutes late to spend the rest of the meeting waiting to be admitted.

Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems

#94
post #73
post #37

TLDR: With 17 digits meeting password is not needed at all. If meeting will be 17 numbers it will be the same as to protect 11 length digit number with 6 digit password. So basically that's the trade off. One could say that password is not the same as meeting ID, but usually they both sent in one email/message and lifetime and protection for them is equal. Also it's easier to input one number than 2 different.

Privately issue a certificate from the organizer and don't just have a link anyone can join.

This makes it hard to have meetings with varying parties.

Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems

#95
This is what technical debt gets you.

I really don't know that zoom has a lot or much at all, but I do know that the number of viable solutions to this could be taken off the table internally because they probably made tech debt commitments in their architecture during their scale up phase that prevents bolting on obvious fixes. I have a lot of sympathy for their position. They aren't evil or bad, but they could do a massive mea culpa PR coup on the level of the netflix culture deck if they did a case study retrospective about the effect of tech debt on scale at critical moments.

It's also a product management fail, where that lack of transparency on encryption is what a project-manager would pull, where a smarter product manager would have weighed the cost of losing their e2e-crypto compliance market.

I can also see why they have security issues because today, security people are on a much longer tailed skill distribution than they were 10y ago and it's hard to listen to most of us. Getting someone to approach it as, "ok, we get that a 9-digit key is literally your product selling UX advantage, let's see what else we can do" is exceedingly rare. Privacy has massive brand implications. Remember blackberry? They launched a new flagship tablet product while their CEO got into an issue with government surveillance and the story became about their risk in India and Asian markets and not whatever that product was called. Zooms story is becoming about privacy problems too.

PMs need to be smarter about this.

Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems

#96
post #81
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a ~2k person company with a market cap of $34B. So the valuation is $17M per employee. I don't feel sorry for them. Also: this crisis is giving them vast amounts of marketing for free. I'm based in Sweden. I was just vaguely aware of Zoom until a few days ago - now I suddenly hear of them all of the time from Late Night hosts on Youtube.

The developers are still people. Doesn't matter the size of the company, it's still a bunch of individuals who are likely suddenly dealing with a lot of stress and pressure that could never have been predicted, or have opportunity to scale up their engineering to meet.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be delighted to be in that situation. At the end of the day Zoom is looking to stay a run-away success - assuming eng is being compensated appropriately it's really one of the best problems one could have in a job.

Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems

#97
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand your point. The usability of clicking a link stays equal regardless of the amount of digits in the ID. Adding a password reduces the usability.

Security pretty much always reduces usability - that’s the trade off.

I've been thinking about security and usability for a while. IMO a big part of use-ability issues are related to interfaces people have to interact with. This is mainly concerning authentication and crypto related processes.

I generally like the idea of smartcards, or having some physical thing you carry around which is used to authenticate with systems.

Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems

#98
I worked in videoconferencing for a while. When it comes to meeting identifiers, striking the right balance between ease of use and security is really hard.

On the one side, maximum ease-of-use is a name or code short enough for someone to say over the phone. "Here, just jump into the videoconferencing meeting 'mikefred' or 'john10' or '39584'". That works particularly well for small meetings where it's immediate obvious if someone else joins and you can stop talking and ask them who they are and kick them out if they shouldn't be there.

On the other hand is long random identifiers in a space large enough they're impossible to guess. If you're joining a meeting from a link then nobody cares, but if you're telling someone over the phone or typing it into the phone it sucks. (And you are very often needing to jump from one form of communication to videoconferencing, where there's no way to "just paste a link" into the initial form.)

There's also no real difference between a short meeting name plus password and a long meeting name, except that passwords tend not to be displayed on screen so it's even harder to find it to tell someone over the phone.

Also there's another big issue in how easy or convenient you make it for people from within your domain/company to join, versus outsiders. Half the company wants to make it harder for outsiders to join (for security), the other half (salespeople) want it to be easier.

The only solution, unfortunately, is educating users to understand the differences. Zoom already has most if not all the necessary options, even modes like "waiting room". But the same options will never work for every meeting. Whoever hosts a meeting needs to understand the options. There's just no substitute.

Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems

#100
post #65

One positive thing about all these horrendous security flaws that have been recently discovered in Zoom, due to its popularity, is that the company seems to be taking them seriously, recently instituting a feature freeze to focus on fixing them: https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-u... As a consequence, I suspect Zoom's security is more likely than not to improve going forward... although it wi…

Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22757697

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756730

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