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Bucketsquatting is finally dead

onecloudplease.com

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Re: Bucketsquatting is finally dead

#91
post #59
post #55

Speaking of unique names within AWS, I learned the other day that even after you delete an AWS account, you can’t reuse the root user email addresses (it’s documented, but I wasn’t aware). Someone at my org used their main company email address for a root user om an account we just closed and a 2nd company email for our current account. We are past the time period where AWS allows for reverting the account deletion.…

Help me understand why you would delete your AWS account if the company and email address are unchanged - I can’t see the motivation. And on the flip side I can easily see why not allowing email addresses to be used again is a reasonable security stance, email addresses are immutable and so limiting them only to one identity seems logical. Sounds quite frustrating for this user of course but I guess it sounds a bit s…

>Help me understand why you would delete your AWS account if the company and email address are unchanged - I can’t see the motivation.

Have you ever worked in a company of any size or complexity before?

1. Multiple accounts at the same company, spun up by different teams (either different departments, regions, operating divisions, or whatever) and eventually they want to consolidate

2. Acquisitions: Company A buys Company B, an admin at Company A takes over AWS account for Company B, then they eventually work on consolidating it down to one account

Re: Bucketsquatting is finally dead

#92
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the naming restrictions and maximum name lengths are all over the place: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manag... Storage accounts are one of the worst offenders here. I would really like to know what kind of internal shenanigans are going on there that prevent dashes to be used within storage account names.

I wonder if it's related to the fact that Windows as such weird rules about allowed file names. Like not directly obviously, more like culturally inside microsoft.

I would not dismiss something like that directly being the cause. Not the reason you can't name a file "CON" on Windows, but it's very likely some weird ass thing they were stringing together with Windows Server and Hyper-V and SMB backed them into the corner we're all in now

Re: Bucketsquatting is finally dead

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No man-in-the-middle is needed [...] Check out passive DNS How does one execute this "passive DNS" without quite literally being on the receiving end, or at least sitting in-between the sending and receiving end? You're quite literally describing what I'm saying, which makes it less of a "leak" and more like "others might collect your data, even your ISP", which I'd say would be accurate than "your DNS leaks".

There's a lot of online documentation about passive DNS. Here's one example > Passive DNS is a historical database of how domains have resolved to IP addresses over time, collected from recursive DNS servers around the world. It has been an industry-standard tool for more than a decade. > Spamhaus’ Passive DNS cluster handles more than 200 million DNS records per hour and stores hundreds of billions of records per mo…

> collected from recursive DNS servers around the world

Yes, of course, because those DNS servers are literally receiving the queries, eg "receiving the data".

Again, there is nothing "leaking" here, that's like saying you leak what HTTP path you're requesting to a server, when you're sending a HTTP request to that server. Of course, that's how the protocol works!

Re: Bucketsquatting is finally dead

#94
post #55

Speaking of unique names within AWS, I learned the other day that even after you delete an AWS account, you can’t reuse the root user email addresses (it’s documented, but I wasn’t aware). Someone at my org used their main company email address for a root user om an account we just closed and a 2nd company email for our current account. We are past the time period where AWS allows for reverting the account deletion.…

AWS support seems to be struggling. I just came to help a new customer who had a rough severance with their previous key engineer. The root account password was documented, but the MFA went to his phone.

We've tried talking to everyone we can, opening tickets, chats, trying to talk to their assigned account rep, etc, no one can remove the MFA. So right now luckily they have other admin accounts, but we straight up can't access their root account. We might have to nuke the entire environment and create a new account which is VERY lame considering they have a complicated and well established AWS account.

Re: Bucketsquatting is finally dead

#96
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notably Discord stopped using that format two years ago, moving to globally unique usernames. Their stated reason[1] for doing so being: > This lets you have the same username as someone else as long as you have different discriminators or different case letters. However, this also means you have to remember a set of 4-digit numbers and account for case sensitivity to connect with your friends. [1]: https://support.d…

The actual reason here, implied but not stated outright in that one, is that Discord being a public platform, having only numbers to discriminate between users makes it extra-trivial to impersonate someone else. Obviously you can still do some of this with unique usernames (you see slight misspellings, adding harder-to-see characters like periods, etc, as strategies), but these are more complex to execute on at scale…

(i work at discord)

Not saying that wasn't ONE of the reasons but the main reason was really that a large chunk of users had no idea that they even had a discriminator, as it was added on top of your chosen username. "add me on discord, my username is slashink" didn't work as people expected and caused more confusion than it was solving. This wasn't universally true either, if you come from a platform like Blizzard's Battle.net that has had discriminators since Battlenet 2.0 came out in 2009 it was a natural part of your identity. End of the day there were more users that expected usernames to be unique the way they are today than expected discriminators.

Addressing that tension was the core reason we made this change. We are almost 3 years past this decision ( https://discord.com/blog/usernames ) and I personally think this change was a positive one.

Re: Bucketsquatting is finally dead

#97
post #30

Sometimes I wonder if package names, bucket names, github account names and so on should use a naming scheme like discord. Eg, @sometag-xxxx where xxxx is a random 4 digit code. Its sort of a middleground between UUID account names and completely human generated names. This approach goes a long way toward democratizing the name space, since nobody can "own" the tag prefix. (10000 people can all share it). This can al…

IMO a better general solution is UUIDs and a petname system, at least as far as chat apps are concerned. For buckets I thought easy to use names was a key feature in most cases. Otherwise why not assign randomly generated single use names? But now that they're adding a namespace that incorporates the account name - an unwieldy numeric ID - I don't understand. In the case of buckets isn't it better to use your own dom…

Having worked in this space for years, it's not nearly as bad as you think. IaC tools can all look up the accountId/region for the current execution context and you can use SSM Parameters to give you a helpful alias in your code.

Also, if you have a bunch of accounts, it's far easier for troubleshooting that the accountId is in the name: "I can't access bucket 'foo'" vs. "I can't access bucket 'foo-12345678901'"

Re: Bucketsquatting is finally dead

#98
post #59
post #55

Speaking of unique names within AWS, I learned the other day that even after you delete an AWS account, you can’t reuse the root user email addresses (it’s documented, but I wasn’t aware). Someone at my org used their main company email address for a root user om an account we just closed and a 2nd company email for our current account. We are past the time period where AWS allows for reverting the account deletion.…

Help me understand why you would delete your AWS account if the company and email address are unchanged - I can’t see the motivation. And on the flip side I can easily see why not allowing email addresses to be used again is a reasonable security stance, email addresses are immutable and so limiting them only to one identity seems logical. Sounds quite frustrating for this user of course but I guess it sounds a bit s…

I did something similar.

When I started, AWS was in its infancy and I was just some guy working on a special project.

Now that same account is bound into an AWS Organization.

AWS Changed. My company changed. the policies change out from under you.

Re: Bucketsquatting is finally dead

#100

I take it advertising your account id isn't a security risk?

If you ever produce and share a signed link for e.g. S3, this link contains your access key ID in it. Turns out you can just slice and decode your Account ID out of that access key, it's in there in base32:

https://medium.com/@TalBeerySec/a-short-note-on-aws-key-id-f...

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