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.
‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems
221–230 of 247 posts
Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a really good reason why that wouldn't work. There's no reason why a war dialer can't create millions of users. The 2-3 second delay doesn't really accomplish much unless you limit their capacity to have requests pending.
s/users/ips/
Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do it in base 9000 with baby names and common words. "Join us in black raven deodorant daisy mega delta leo " Also create dud rooms with prerecorded conversation.
or honeypot rooms with super secret sounding military talk
Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems
#224This 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…
I think you overestimate the reliability of the alternatives. Zoom focused all their early engineering muscle on reliability. When we build new products, we don't have infinite resources to attack every front simultaneously. We have finite resources to prove a concept, and we incur debt in just about every other dimension. Now that everyone is using them (precisely because of reliability) the emphasis becomes other t…
Strange and snarky comment for a "Chief Technical Officer". Software constantly evolves, it's a process of continuous refinement.
Zoom's past success may have been partially attributed to "1st gen engineers" hitting the jackpot. Zoom's fate right now rests on the ability of those "2nd generation engineers" to keep the show going.
Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems
#225One 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…
Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aside from the fact I'm not wrong. I think you need to source and/or explain your unfounded claims: Google Delays Hangouts Shutdown Until June 2020 https://www.extremetech.com/internet/297037-google-delays-ha... WebRTC Internals in Chrome with frame rate capped at 5 FPS while screen sharing: https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/absxt2/chromebox_... Screen Share through Hangouts/Meet with high FPS? R: Nope https…
hangouts meet does 1080p (whether it works now during the covid pandemic I don't know) and is Google's replacement for the regular hangouts. it has been available for companies and has been part of g-suite for enterprise since 2017.
Anyway, my biggest concert is with lack of fluidity of slide/screen sharing.
It is not viable for presentations with animations or where the presenter needs to point with mouse/cursor to a specific point or area of the slide (for example, a point in a curve in a graph).
I work with this.
I'm struggling with this tools first hand. My impression is there a lot of opinions here from people which is not using these tools.
Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
hangouts meet does 1080p (whether it works now during the covid pandemic I don't know) and is Google's replacement for the regular hangouts. it has been available for companies and has been part of g-suite for enterprise since 2017.
Where I work, it defaults the webcam resolutions to 360p and we can only choose 720p for our 1080p hardware. Anyway, my biggest concert is with lack of fluidity of slide/screen sharing. It is not viable for presentations with animations or where the presenter needs to point with mouse/cursor to a specific point or area of the slide (for example, a point in a curve in a graph). I work with this. I'm struggling with th…
It sounds like your case is less common but the idea is that a video or camera feed can handle more compression (and subsequent drop in quality) as long as it isn't choppy or dropping out. Alternately, a slide or document may have small text which would quickly become unreadable if the compression is too high. To prevent that, you get high quality but only 5FPS or whatever so people can read your document or slide.
Slides and docs don't usually need high framerates so it would just be wasteful to try delivering a mostly static, high resolution, low compression 1920x1080 feed of a PowerPoint at 15 or 30 FPS.
There are ways around this (even on a consumer PC) such as using something like OBS to switch between sources like a webcam, a video clip, or a screen cap and feed them to a virtual webcam (which can be selected in your VTC software as the webcam input). Alternately, there are dedicated switchers and mixers but they're usually reserved for studios or in-facility installations.
But again...you may not like the results even so. The webcam feed often trades higher FPS for higher compression.
Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do people keep saying it just works? It just works if you install their app, probably. But audio doesn't work at all in Firefox. That's not really just works for me.
Neither does Webex's browser version - even though I give it permissions, audio requires Webex to call me. Latest Safari/macOS.
Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even having an 9- to 11-digit meeting code plus say a 6-digit passcode would be a burden for some people, though it's really the only way to do that portion of it right. Strong disagree; people can handle 10-digit phone numbers, they can handle an order 10-digit meeting ID.
Who memorizes phone numbers anymore? Just because you can doesnt mean you will if theres an easier alternate version, and a lot of the public doesnt care about security enough to not use to easier option
Re: ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
That last statement, I'm there with you on. Tech debt is necessary, it could even be renamed "tech leverage," because that's what a lot of it is. My thing is that there are tons of potential ways to mitigate zoombombing, even incrementally, and that they haven't or chose not to indicates it's because there were cost barriers to doing it. It has the tech debt smell, and it's what I've seen in other orgs.
Do any of those potential ways impact on the ease of use of Zoom? Do they make it harder to join a meeting?
Then there are ones with vs. without user interaction.
Without user interaction:
- rate limit join attempts so that you at minimum need proxies or a botnet to guess room names.
- do a simple entropy measurement of multiple attempts and rate limit anything that exhibits symmetry or monotonicity.
- add a "correct battery horse staple" style key to the url instead of or in addition to the 9 digit pin so the link is not easily guessable, but still has the mnemonic quality for people entering it manually.
- static personal room ID's only work with a passwd/token (not pin) whereas ephemeral ones can be chosen from a much larger search space. (yes, just add entropy)
- free sessions limited to 40mins or whatever should select from a name space large enough it will take a botnet to hit even one ephemeral session in the 40min timeframe.
- separate the invite link from the login link so that session owners can specify that the user needs to click from their email invite so it gets bound to the browser, and you zoom can set a token before redirecting them to the live session.
with user interaction:
- Obvious one would be a user PIN for ephemeral room IDs.
- Next obvious would be to choose a real security protocol and key management scheme (http://www.lsv.fr/Software/spore/index.html)
Rest of user interactive ones is exercise to the reader, as those are all solved problems.
The challenge is that they require keeping logical state at the application layer, which is specifically the kind of complexity you avoid in your scale-up architecture - and it burns you down the road.