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Ask HN: What's the actual fallout been from the Cloudflare bug?

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Ask HN: What's the actual fallout been from the Cloudflare bug?

#1
So I understand what happened with the Cloudflare bug, that https POST request content was leaked into HTML documents on the same or other servers and some of it was cached by search engines or malicious foreign powers. Whenever something like this happens the HN community whips up into a frenzy with people coming out of the woodwork that appear to be experts saying that "this is the end" and "this is so bad, we're f*cked".

Meanwhile - none of my friends in the "real world" (outside the HN bubble) seem to be affected by this at all. I have a client that's a Cloudflare customer and they got an email saying they just weren't affected. And I haven't seen any huge leaks or items in the press about some terrible hack or theft that has brought someone or a corporate "down".

Should we always take news like this with a grain of salt? When can we tell when an attack like this is a fundamental undermining of the entire internet infrastructure, an attack that will cripple a few major companies, or just an issue that revealed some data but was mostly just overblown? Would love to hear some opinions!

Re: Ask HN: What's the actual fallout been from the Cloudflare bug?

#2
The trouble with this sort of bug is that we'll likely never know.

Some people's accounts will be compromised, and nobody will know if it's been due to fishing, insecure passwords, or an information leak such as the Cloudflare bug, or an undisclosed or undiscovered breach somewhere.

The more responsible Cloudflare customers have invalidated existing sessions; that's much less hassle than forcing a password reset, and since session tokens are transmitted in every request, a leaked token is much more likely than a leaked password.

Re: Ask HN: What's the actual fallout been from the Cloudflare bug?

#4
Hopefully the fallout is that Cloudflare gets its act together.

Even if your friends know 100% that they can't possibly have been negatively affected by tons of private information being dumped all over the internet, I'm not sure how such anecdotal evidence is any more instructive than a HN "bubble".

Even if nobody at all ended up negatively affected in any serious way, I don't see why people shouldn't remark on the potential effects of such a fiasco when it happens. Was anyone really predicting "the end"?

Re: Ask HN: What's the actual fallout been from the Cloudflare bug?

#5
As I understand it -- somebody please correct me if I have this wrong -- the thing about Cloudbleed is that there isn't necessarily any relationship between the site whose page is cached and the site whose credentials appear in that cached page. So the only way to know that a particular site didn't have credentials leaked is to search all the caches of all the search engines on the Internet.

So, as perlgeek says, we'll probably never know specifically what the impact was.

Re: Ask HN: What's the actual fallout been from the Cloudflare bug?

#6
I think you're misinterpreting the comments about the scale of the leak. The risk that a concrete compromise would occur as a result was always pretty small.

The bigger thing was the grandiose scale, the impact on administrators in having to rotate a significant number of credentials, and the hit to CloudFlare's reputation. A bug where you randomly dump random data without regard to its sensitivity or origin (i.e., data from completely unrelated sites could've been included in the dump), and have no way to tell what actually leaked, is the worst kind of privacy bug there is, precisely because it's impossible to triage. No one can ever know everything that actually got out.

CloudFlare is now a major piece of internet infrastructure. It's impossible to know that anything sent through a CloudFlare server between Sept 2016 and Feb 2017 wasn't accidentally publicly leaked, and worse, non-trivial quantities of this data were being accidentally saved permanently in search indexes. Surely some bad actors have saved such results in their own private indexes as well.

When CloudFlare says "your site was probably unaffected", they're making a guess, because they have no way to actually tell. They're just assuming that based on the volume of requests your CloudFlare endpoint receives and the volume of requests made to endpoints that exhibited this bug, content from your site probably didn't get out. But there's no way to know.

If we take that seriously, it requires us to consider everything that went through a CloudFlare server as potentially publicized and preserved in the public record (including usually-transparent unique identifiers like session cookies/tokens). We then have to assume that an adversary obtained any and all such data, and respond as best as we can to preclude the possibility of that adversary exploiting the leaked secrets to harm our and/or our company's interests.

Of course, the flip side of the sheer scale of this, and the fact that the bug was relatively rare and that there was no way to control what content it dumped, is that it's very unlikely any of your data specifically actually got leaked.

If you and/or your company are OK with crossing your fingers and hoping this won't affect you, there is probably a 99.something-something-something% chance you'd be right. Most people have responded by resetting tokens/passwords for anything that uses CloudFlare, since that's relatively low-impact and most people were probably overdue for a credential recycle anyway, and have left it at that.

This does clearly illustrate that the internet has a few de-facto junction points, which would be very high-value for an attacker. That's worth keeping in mind.

Re: Ask HN: What's the actual fallout been from the Cloudflare bug?

#7
An information leak is an information leak : we still fail to realise that it's something that's happening daily. There's no drama in it.

Criminals are taking advantage of opportunities like this every day, still no one cares too much about it (HN bubble & friends excluded).

Things like this may have a strong impact or not in the press/popularity circus, but in this particular case it seems they promptly monitored the situation (thanks to their competent staff).

What most surprises me is that their highly competent staff is thoughtlessly violating one of the security principles in sw : SECURITY BY ISOLATION .

No one (no matter how able you are) can write absolutely bug-free algorithms : even when dealing with formal verified software you can still attack the assumptions.

Security by correctness is a laudable effort, but computing customers data with a single process is not sane. I'm aware they're doing this for performance reasons, but a well implemented isolation layer would have prevented this (even while dealing with a bug like that).

Their architecture is vulnerable.

Re: Ask HN: What's the actual fallout been from the Cloudflare bug?

#8

As I understand it -- somebody please correct me if I have this wrong -- the thing about Cloudbleed is that there isn't necessarily any relationship between the site whose page is cached and the site whose credentials appear in that cached page. So the only way to know that a particular site didn't have credentials leaked is to search all the caches of all the search engines on the Internet. So, as perlgeek says, we'…

Or if they're not a Cloudflare customer.
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