Live data from Hacker News

I pwned half of America's fast food chains simultaneously

mrbruh.com

51–60 of 513 posts

Re: I pwned half of America's fast food chains simultaneously

#51

Firebase is a shitshow. I say this as someone who really tried to like it and sadly built a project for a client using it. Other than this security vuln, the issues vs. just using postgres are: * It is more work! Despite being a backend as a service it is much less code to just write a simple API backend for your thing both in time to do it and time to learn how to do it. Think of Firebase as being on the abstraction…

Supabase is the iPhone to Firebase's Palm V -- highly recommend, if you're a fellow millenial like me who grew up on mobile, and things like "much less code to just write a simple API backend for your thing" sounds like 6 months and paying another engineer.

EDIT:

loud buzzer

Careful, Icarus: "permissions can be setup to allow global read-writes" is a "vuln" of every system.

p.s. Any comment on why her blog has you guys "remembering Chattr" then getting a seedy Firebase pwner GUI, and yours has you diligently looking through .ai TLDs?

Re: I pwned half of America's fast food chains simultaneously

#52

Firebase is a shitshow. I say this as someone who really tried to like it and sadly built a project for a client using it. Other than this security vuln, the issues vs. just using postgres are: * It is more work! Despite being a backend as a service it is much less code to just write a simple API backend for your thing both in time to do it and time to learn how to do it. Think of Firebase as being on the abstraction…

Supabase is the iPhone to Firebase's Palm V -- highly recommend, if you're a fellow millenial like me who grew up on mobile, and things like "much less code to just write a simple API backend for your thing" sounds like 6 months and paying another engineer. EDIT: loud buzzer Careful, Icarus: "permissions can be setup to allow global read-writes" is a "vuln" of every system. p.s. Any comment on why her blog has you gu…

loud buzzer

Sorry, but supabase has a similar issue.

Another blog going over that has or will be made by Eva (referenced on the site)

Re: I pwned half of America's fast food chains simultaneously

#53

Firebase is a shitshow. I say this as someone who really tried to like it and sadly built a project for a client using it. Other than this security vuln, the issues vs. just using postgres are: * It is more work! Despite being a backend as a service it is much less code to just write a simple API backend for your thing both in time to do it and time to learn how to do it. Think of Firebase as being on the abstraction…

Supabase is the iPhone to Firebase's Palm V -- highly recommend, if you're a fellow millenial like me who grew up on mobile, and things like "much less code to just write a simple API backend for your thing" sounds like 6 months and paying another engineer. EDIT: loud buzzer Careful, Icarus: "permissions can be setup to allow global read-writes" is a "vuln" of every system. p.s. Any comment on why her blog has you gu…

> sounds like 6 months and paying another engineer.

If you take this approach, it's "pay now or pay later".

-- Fellow millenial

Re: I pwned half of America's fast food chains simultaneously

#54

Firebase is a shitshow. I say this as someone who really tried to like it and sadly built a project for a client using it. Other than this security vuln, the issues vs. just using postgres are: * It is more work! Despite being a backend as a service it is much less code to just write a simple API backend for your thing both in time to do it and time to learn how to do it. Think of Firebase as being on the abstraction…

Supabase is the iPhone to Firebase's Palm V -- highly recommend, if you're a fellow millenial like me who grew up on mobile, and things like "much less code to just write a simple API backend for your thing" sounds like 6 months and paying another engineer. EDIT: loud buzzer Careful, Icarus: "permissions can be setup to allow global read-writes" is a "vuln" of every system. p.s. Any comment on why her blog has you gu…

I think Supabase is much better than Firebase, but I find its security model worse; Firebase was very clearly designed with this in mind, while Supabase is just a Postgres DB with RLS as an afterthought.

One particular thing that annoys me with SB is that by default, or when you create a table with SQL, they're publicly accessible, which is very bad! (Firebase defaults to no access in production mode.)

Re: I pwned half of America's fast food chains simultaneously

#55
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supabase is the iPhone to Firebase's Palm V -- highly recommend, if you're a fellow millenial like me who grew up on mobile, and things like "much less code to just write a simple API backend for your thing" sounds like 6 months and paying another engineer. EDIT: loud buzzer Careful, Icarus: "permissions can be setup to allow global read-writes" is a "vuln" of every system. p.s. Any comment on why her blog has you gu…

I think Supabase is much better than Firebase, but I find its security model worse; Firebase was very clearly designed with this in mind, while Supabase is just a Postgres DB with RLS as an afterthought. One particular thing that annoys me with SB is that by default, or when you create a table with SQL, they're publicly accessible, which is very bad! (Firebase defaults to no access in production mode.)

In what way do you perceive it to be an after thought?

It's front-and-center constantly, and has _all_ access disabled by default on tables every time I use it.

Re: I pwned half of America's fast food chains simultaneously

#56
It's not clear if the author was hired to do this pentest or is a guerilla/good samaritan. If it is indeed the latter, I wonder how they are so brazen about it. Does chattr.ai have a responsible disclosure policy?

In my eyes people should be free to pentest whatever as long as there is no intent to cause harm and any findings are reported. Sadly, many companies will freak out and get the law involved, even if you are a good samaritan.

Re: I pwned half of America's fast food chains simultaneously

#57

Firebase is a shitshow. I say this as someone who really tried to like it and sadly built a project for a client using it. Other than this security vuln, the issues vs. just using postgres are: * It is more work! Despite being a backend as a service it is much less code to just write a simple API backend for your thing both in time to do it and time to learn how to do it. Think of Firebase as being on the abstraction…

I see this kind of post all of the time. If you’re using relational data with a key value store you’re doing it wrong. You can do anything you can do with a relational database with a key value store, but there are trade offs since now you have to heavily denormalize for performance and figure out how to keep things reasonably consistent.

Firebase is not an alternative to Postgres alone. You need an actual API server. The value of Firebase is you don’t need that, nor do you need to worry about ops, authentication, queues or other things.

The issue the OP found could have been easily fixed by simply reading the docs, but that seems to be a rare activity these days.

Re: I pwned half of America's fast food chains simultaneously

#58
post #56

It's not clear if the author was hired to do this pentest or is a guerilla/good samaritan. If it is indeed the latter, I wonder how they are so brazen about it. Does chattr.ai have a responsible disclosure policy? In my eyes people should be free to pentest whatever as long as there is no intent to cause harm and any findings are reported. Sadly, many companies will freak out and get the law involved, even if you are…

> It's not clear if the author was hired to do this pentest or is a guerilla/good samaritan

Pretty clear to me, "it was searching for exposed Firebase credentials on any of the hundreds of recent AI startups.", running a script to scan hundreds of startups

> Sadly, many companies will freak out and get the law involved, even if you are a good samaritan.

Yeah, but that also ends with that company being shamed a lot of the time

Re: I pwned half of America's fast food chains simultaneously

#59

Firebase is a shitshow. I say this as someone who really tried to like it and sadly built a project for a client using it. Other than this security vuln, the issues vs. just using postgres are: * It is more work! Despite being a backend as a service it is much less code to just write a simple API backend for your thing both in time to do it and time to learn how to do it. Think of Firebase as being on the abstraction…

Firebase's whole premise is seamless syncing between locally cached data and your backend. If you "just use Postgres", life is simpler until your user goes offline/runs out of mobile data/whatever, and then they're immediately screwed.

Re: I pwned half of America's fast food chains simultaneously

#60
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Supabase is much better than Firebase, but I find its security model worse; Firebase was very clearly designed with this in mind, while Supabase is just a Postgres DB with RLS as an afterthought. One particular thing that annoys me with SB is that by default, or when you create a table with SQL, they're publicly accessible, which is very bad! (Firebase defaults to no access in production mode.)

In what way do you perceive it to be an after thought? It's front-and-center constantly, and has _all_ access disabled by default on tables every time I use it.

It only has access disabled if you enable RLS on that table. If you do `CREATE TABLE`, or don't check the checkbox in the UI (TBF it's big and green and has a warning that's hard to miss), then access is public.

I guess my main concern is that it's hard to setup RLS correctly using SQL. Because it's two separate statements, if your `CREATE TABLE` succeeds, but the `CREATE POLICY` does not, you're also exposed. And it is more annoying than it should've been to test the rules (Firebase has a dedicated tool for that).

I now just use Supabase to host a normal Postgres that only my backend connects to. That works well.

Post reply on HN