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One million passports leaked online

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Re: One million passports leaked online

#31

> Note what happened. A high-value credential—a passport—was used in an ancillary low-value authentication system: ID verification for cannabis dispensaries. And it’s the low-value system that got hacked, putting the high-value credential at risk. Why do these systems hold onto user's data post verification?

Why wouldn't they? There are probbaly significant downsides if they fail an audit requirement, and they're probably mandated to retain records for some period, with no consequences to extended retention.

Set up a system so that it costs you nothing to do a bad thing but possibly wrecks you legally and financially to do the good thing, and people will inevitably do the bad thing. They shouldn't be collecting this information in the first place.

The people who design these policies are incapable of actually building things that work. They are not the intelligent, competent leaders exercising a careful craft that they like to pretend they are.

They keep going after age verification, online ID, central bank digital currencies, etc - keep this incident in mind. The people who implement and write these policies are morons. They don't game things out and plan for redundancy or resiliency. They don't take into account bad faith actors. They don't account for deliberate exploitation of the system.

Re: One million passports leaked online

#33

> Note what happened. A high-value credential—a passport—was used in an ancillary low-value authentication system: ID verification for cannabis dispensaries. And it’s the low-value system that got hacked, putting the high-value credential at risk. Why do these systems hold onto user's data post verification?

Why wouldn't they? There are probbaly significant downsides if they fail an audit requirement, and they're probably mandated to retain records for some period, with no consequences to extended retention. Set up a system so that it costs you nothing to do a bad thing but possibly wrecks you legally and financially to do the good thing, and people will inevitably do the bad thing. They shouldn't be collecting this info…

[dead]

Re: One million passports leaked online

#34

Much as passports are very important for proving identity etc, people who travel have had their passport scanned, photographed or photocopied by pretty much every hotel they've stayed in. I'm not sure the shoebox in the backroom in Koh Samui with the photocopies in constitutes good storage hygiene protocols. How that doesn't turn into rampant identity theft I don't know, or maybe it does? Not, happily, for me... yet.

the whole "not being an automatable remote sql injection away from everything" quality of physical objects grants a filing cabinet a tremendous amount of inherent security compared to anything digital.

Re: One million passports leaked online

#35
> Zero password protection on document storage systems > > No encryption for sensitive identity verification data > > Public URL access with no authentication requirements > > No access logging or monitoring systems in place

Pretty much the bingo of secure storage, even CTF demos make it less obvious. Storing a document that they have no business keeping in the first place, with no security whatsoever.

Re: One million passports leaked online

#37

> Note what happened. A high-value credential—a passport—was used in an ancillary low-value authentication system: ID verification for cannabis dispensaries. And it’s the low-value system that got hacked, putting the high-value credential at risk. Why do these systems hold onto user's data post verification?

[dead]

Re: One million passports leaked online

#38

> Note what happened. A high-value credential—a passport—was used in an ancillary low-value authentication system: ID verification for cannabis dispensaries. And it’s the low-value system that got hacked, putting the high-value credential at risk. Why do these systems hold onto user's data post verification?

I have a story about this, although it's a bit convoluted and not entirely related. But it does showcase low-value usecase compromising a high-value auth mechanism.

I was working on a project, client is a Real Estate agency, they use a CRM where they upload houses and it in turn uploads it to various sites like Zillow. We needed a list of their listed houses, so we wanted to use that data source instead of making a CRUD where they have to add houses yet again.

We ask the CRM sales team about APIs, they tell us that there's no accounts for third parties, client accounts have APIs, so we have to ask the client for an API key (or for their account password).

Which makes sense in general I guess, but the data is public in our case, so the CRM sales staff 's idea was that we should ask the client to let us access their account in order to get public data. We proceeded to scrape the houses from a website like Zillow like cavemen.

As it happens, our project was ancilliary low-value. So I don't doubt that the clients of this CRM are vulnerable in a similar way, and the root cause of the issue isn't evident at all, I can see 2:

1- Paradoxically, having an API that always requires an API KEY (as opposed to allowing unauthenticated access for public data) is less secure, as credentials/tokens will be used more often when not necessary.

2- This CRM effectively acted as an aggregator, consuming the APIs to publish to other vendors, but they don't provide an API for other vendors to read data from them. This effectively causes third party vendors to authenticate as the client, which is just incorrect. Credentials should identify a person/group, not a usecase.

Re: One million passports leaked online

#39

> Note what happened. A high-value credential—a passport—was used in an ancillary low-value authentication system: ID verification for cannabis dispensaries. And it’s the low-value system that got hacked, putting the high-value credential at risk. Why do these systems hold onto user's data post verification?

Why wouldn't they? There are probbaly significant downsides if they fail an audit requirement, and they're probably mandated to retain records for some period, with no consequences to extended retention. Set up a system so that it costs you nothing to do a bad thing but possibly wrecks you legally and financially to do the good thing, and people will inevitably do the bad thing. They shouldn't be collecting this info…

> Why wouldn't they?

They most likely weren't allowed to keep it past the verification per GDPR art.5. Once the passport has been verified for whatever purpose they needed it ("age verified to be > 18yo on 2026-06-12" or "identity verified to be XXXX YYYY"), there is no legitimate use for the passport photo and details anymore, and they should delete it.

Re: One million passports leaked online

#40

Much as passports are very important for proving identity etc, people who travel have had their passport scanned, photographed or photocopied by pretty much every hotel they've stayed in. I'm not sure the shoebox in the backroom in Koh Samui with the photocopies in constitutes good storage hygiene protocols. How that doesn't turn into rampant identity theft I don't know, or maybe it does? Not, happily, for me... yet.

the whole "not being an automatable remote sql injection away from everything" quality of physical objects grants a filing cabinet a tremendous amount of inherent security compared to anything digital.

Much like that old quip about the bandwidth of a vehicle full of tapes: "Never underestimate the at-rest security of a room full of filing cabinets."

Friction and delay have always been aspects of security.

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