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Abusing Go's Infrastructure

reverse.put.as

71–80 of 80 posts

Re: Abusing Go's Infrastructure

#71
post #3

Googler, opinions are my own. I know nothing about this space. I would hope the Go team collaborated with GCP and Drive, as hosting malicious files is something Google has to deal with all the time. This isn't much different from other endpoints Google already allows people to put random data on.

> I would hope the Go team collaborated with GCP and Drive

Former Googler, I know nothing about the Go Dev Tools team, but Google collaborates in this way better than almost any massive company I've worked at or heard about from close friends.

Google is really good at having a central team manage infrastructure, and share it across the company. As long as it's not a messenger app. Surely (pure guessing) the go team is using the internal blob store, and I think there is some internal-infra teams that handle abuse and file scanning automatically.

Re: Abusing Go's Infrastructure

#72
post #33
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question, how would you know without invading the user's privacy?

An algorithm that processes private user data is by itself not invading anyone's privacy. It's clear to me that invasion of privacy only happens when humans look at private user data directly, or look at user data that's not sufficiently processed by an algorithm. Otherwise, something as simple as a spell checker would be an invasion of privacy because it literally looks at every word in an email you write. That's ab…

An algorithm that denies service, changes ad behavior, etc based on user content is definitely invading privacy compared to your spell checker case.

The spell checker would also be a massive privacy invasion if if flagged users based on the content of what they wrote.

Re: Abusing Go's Infrastructure

#73
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was HTTP SXG (signed exchanges) but it never seemed to get any traction https://web.dev/articles/signed-exchanges

Even if the content is signed, there’s still the issue that the proxy gets to see everything you read, right?

that's the point of a proxy that can share contents between clients...

Re: Abusing Go's Infrastructure

#74
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that was much more useful as a use case before pip started requiring you to be in a venv/virtualenv/pipenv/pyenv/whatever to download packages

I've never encountered this requirement in many years of daily use - pip for me has always happily installed anything if it can. Now I've definitely seen customized distributions of python from package managers that have taken steps to prevent you from using pip. IIRC, the python you get from `apt-get install python` in Debian does this? I.e., it's designed to support system utilities, not as a user's general purpose…

https://p.mort.coffee/DEq.png

This happens on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and macOS (Homebrew). I'm pretty sure it's just a core part of pip these days.

Re: Abusing Go's Infrastructure

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CUE team worked with the Go team on the module system. From these interactions, and community input, they decided against using a proxy like Go has. The "exploit" in the article was one of the reasons they made this decision, and chose to use OCI registries instead. The V1 proposal actually proposed using the same Go proxy servers as a stopgap, which received significant pushback from the community (I was probabl…

One thing that the Go module system solves that seems to be unaddressed in CUE's design based on OCI is the sum database / transparency log. I could add a "Statement that we might wish to make for a module M" to the "Module contents assurance" section: - The content of module M is the same content that everyone else sees for the same `$path@$version`. Though I guess users can utilize existing solutions like https://g…

yup, the plan is to enable sigstore for all users, which provides more than just the sumdb hashing integrity.

https://docs.sigstore.dev/verifying/attestation/

Re: Abusing Go's Infrastructure

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Gmail and Google groups, and Google drive, and Gchat, on and on. The data you store doesn't even have to be public. With Gmail they would distribute credentials to log in and read attachments that they uploaded via imap. (I am a former Google SAD-SRE [Spam, Abuse, Delivery])

Just curious, "Delivery" doesn't seem to be the same sort of thing as "Spam" and "Abuse": why are the three grouped?

I was apparently not watching this well enough, sorry for the delayed response.

Deliver was because we ran the SMTP and queuing infrastructure at the time. We started as Gmail SRE, then split out some of the delivery and abuse services into its own team (SAD), then SAD got SRE, hence SAD-SRE =)

Re: Abusing Go's Infrastructure

#78
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Gmail and Google groups, and Google drive, and Gchat, on and on. The data you store doesn't even have to be public. With Gmail they would distribute credentials to log in and read attachments that they uploaded via imap. (I am a former Google SAD-SRE [Spam, Abuse, Delivery])

Question, how would you know without invading the user's privacy?

Pre-AI we had a system that watched user patterns and would identify possibly suspect patterns that were outside of the norm. We also had system that would content-id the images and attachments to see what was going uploaded in a general way. Given enough suspicion then the account would be opened to look for abusive patterns.

There is absolutely no promise on any cloud hosted services that a human will not ever see your data. However, at Google it was made very, very, VERY clear that if we had to scan somebody's personal email for any reason then discussion of the contents outside of legally mandated, or required for work ways would lead to immediate termination and possible lawsuit for any damages to reputation incurred.

While fixing user accounts, or dealing with delivery of content I saw epic piles of personal email. Besides the ones full of CASM or other abusive material I couldn't say that I ever remembered the contents 30 minutes later. Its like a checker at a grocery store. They don't care about whatever embarrassing tings your buying and won't remember you 10 minutes later. =)

Re: Abusing Go's Infrastructure

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Gmail and Google groups, and Google drive, and Gchat, on and on. The data you store doesn't even have to be public. With Gmail they would distribute credentials to log in and read attachments that they uploaded via imap. (I am a former Google SAD-SRE [Spam, Abuse, Delivery])

> I am a former Google SAD-SRE From long enough ago that I should apologize to you for libgmail: https://libgmail.sourceforge.net ? :D

libgmail was the least of our problems. There was a Polish software team that wrote a bittorrent layer on top of Gmail. That thing was a pain in the butt as they constantly improved it to get around abuse filters and such. Plus it had parity bits so if we killed accounts it would just re-replicate the data to new accounts.. That software was devilish and impressive at the exact same time. =)

Re: Abusing Go's Infrastructure

#80
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question, how would you know without invading the user's privacy?

I think there was a case, where several people loged in the same Gmail account and shared data not by sending mails, just by write and read drafts.

yep.. And it would split uploads across dozens of accounts with parity so that if any account was disabled it could re-create the data from what was in the other accounts. (think bittorrent using imap uploaded content in gmail)
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