Given the simplicity of the exploit, I really doubt that claim. Seems more likely they just don't have a way of detecting whether it happened.
If they have a log of all JWTs issued that records which user requested and which email in JWT, then they can retroactively check if they issued any (user, email) pair that they shouldn't have. Then they can assert that there was no misuse, if they only found this researcher's attempt.
There are obviously lots hypotheticals for which this might not be verifiable.
What makes you say that? Lots of hacks and leaks shows that Apple only see Privacy as a word to sell stuff. It isn't something they code for if not forced by leaks and hacks (laws in the US also is against privacy by design).
Just as a first-hand anecdote to back this up, a dev at my former company which did a mix of software dev and security consulting found a much more complex security issue with Apple Pay within the first hour of starting to implement the feature for a client and engaging with the relevant docs.
How did no one else notice this? The only thing I can think of is the “hidden in plain sight” thing? Or maybe the redacted URL endpoint here was not obvious?
Thank you to everyone who educated me.
I can’t provide an explanation of the behavior you observed without more information, but I can reasonably conclude that the vulnerability here wasn’t the cause.
> similarly
I understand why they wanted to modify OAuth 2.0, but departing from a spec is a very risky move.
> $100,000
That was a good bounty. Appropriate given scope and impact. But it would have been a lot cheaper to offer a pre-release bounty program. We (Remind) occasionally add unreleased features to our bounty program with some extra incentive to explore (e.g. "Any submissions related to new feature X will automatically be considered High severity for the next two weeks"). Getting some eyeballs on it while we're wrapping up QA means we're better prepared for public launch.
This particular bug is fairly run-of-the-mill for an experienced researcher to find. The vast majority of bug bounty submissions I see are simple "replay requests but change IDs/emails/etc". This absolutely would have been caught in a pre-release bounty program.
The token described in this disclosure is an OpenID Connect 1.0 Token. OIDC is a state of the art AuthN protocol that supersets OAuth with additional security controls. It's used by Google, Facebook and Twitch amongst others.
I'd do more analysis, but the author leaves off the most important part here (not sure why)
https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html#IDToke...
From https://developer.apple.com/security-bounty/payouts/
"Issues that are unique to designated developer or public betas, including regressions, can result in a 50% additional bonus if the issues were previously unknown to Apple."
At least from the writeup, the bug seems so simple that it is unbelievable that it could have passes a code review and testing.
I suspect things were maybe not as simple as explained here, otherwise this is at the same incompetence level as storing passwords in plaintext :O.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800676 (Anyone can login as root without any technical effort required)
And to top it off (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15828767)
Apple keeps having all sorts of very simple "unbelievable" bugs.
There seems to be kind of a common theme to these:
- SSL certificates not validated at all
- root authentication not validated at all
- JWT token creation for arbitrary Apple ID users not validated at all
I think these are all very likely due to error and not malice, but it's pretty crazy how these gaping holes keep being found.
(The session itself was ok-ish. It was some trainings about xsrf, nothing special either)
(That incident also triggered me to purchase a sheet of [citation needed] stickers from xkcd to put on my laptop, so the next time this kind of thing happens I can just point to the sticker on my laptop. But I didn't got a chance to do that yet since received the stickers)
They are the Nintendo of Computing. They have some novelties, but in general they are average at their best. Notice that both Nintendo and Apple are big advertisers.
If that's it, it's about as bad as doing password authentication in JavaScript and passing authenticated=true as a request parameter.
Edit: Looking at the OAuth picture in the article, my guess would be like adding a step in between 1 and 2 where the server says "what email address do you want here" and the (client on the) user side is responsible for interacting with the email relay service and posting back with a preferred email address. Or the server does it but POSTS back to the same endpoint which means the user could just include whatever they want right from the start.
The only thing that makes me think I might not be right is that doing it like that is just way too dumb.
AND I'm guessing a bunch of Apple services probably use OAuth amongst themselves, so this might be the worst authentication bug of the decade. The $100k is a nice payday for the researcher, but I bet the scope of the damage that could have been done was MASSIVE.
Edit 2: I still don't understand why the token wouldn't mainly be linked to a subject that's a user id. Isn't 'sub' the main identifier in a JWT? Maybe it's just been too long and I don't remember right.
The details are very sparse in the post, but I believe the "sub" claim is a unique and stable value for the user against a particular relying party (based on that being a requirement in OpenID Connect.)
You _should_ be relying on sub rather than email address, which is not guaranteed to be sent every time, to stay stable, or be unique across accounts.
So while this was a zero day in terms of providing arbitrary email addresses as verified addresses, it may have not led to any account compromises.
1. Don't add these.
2. If you must add something, structure it so it can only exist in test-only binaries.
3. If you really really need to add a 'must not enable in prod' flag then you must also continuously monitor prod to ensure that it is not enabled.
Really hoping they follow up with a root-cause explanation.
Took about two years to fix. Gave me credit. No money.
I'm not surprised here.
They basically made a huge fundamental design mistake.
Sometime code review is just "Please change the name of this function" and testing is just testing the positive cases not the negative ones. Yes, even in companies like apple and google.
After this, they should remove the requirement of Apple Sign in. How do you require an app to implement this with such a ridiculous zero day?
The problem I have is that I can’t tell what their processes are beyond the generic wording on this page[1]
[1] support.apple.com/guide/security/introduction-seccd5016d31/web
No, it's completely inexcusable. There should never be such a simple, major security vulnerability like this. Overlooking something this basic is incompetence.
If this is not the issue, then the implementation might be too complex for people to compare it with the spec (gap between the theory and the practice). I would be extremely interested in a post mortem from Apple.
I have a few follow up questions.
1. seeing how simple the first JWT request is, how can Apple actually authenticate the user at this point?
2. If Apple does not authenticate the user for the first request, how can they check that this bug wasn’t exploited?
3. Anybody can explain what this payload is?
{ "iss": "https://appleid.apple.com", "aud": "com.XXXX.weblogin", "exp": 158XXXXXXX, "iat": 158XXXXXXX, "sub": "XXXX.XXXXX.XXXX", "c_hash": "FJXwx9EHQqXXXXXXXX", "email": "contact@bhavukjain.com", // or "XXXXX@privaterelay.appleid.com" "email_verified": "true", "auth_time": 158XXXXXXX, "nonce_supported": true }
My guess is that c_hash is the hash of the whole payload and it is kept server side.
It's not a bug with protocol or security algorithm. A lock by itself does not provides any security if its not put in the right place.
1. User clicks or touches the “Sign in with Apple” button
2. App or website redirects the user to Apple’s authentication service with some information in the URL including the application ID (aka. OAuth Client ID), Redirect URL, scopes (aka. permissions) and an optional state parameter
3. User types their username and password and if correct Apple redirects them back to the “Redirect URL” with an identity token, authorization code, and user identifier to your app
4. The identity token is a JSON Web Token (JWT) and contains the following claims:
• iss: The issuer-registered claim key, which has the value https://appleid.apple.com.
• sub: The unique identifier for the user.
• aud: Your client_id in your Apple Developer account.
• exp: The expiry time for the token. This value is typically set to five minutes.
• iat: The time the token was issued.
• nonce: A String value used to associate a client session and an ID token. This value is used to mitigate replay attacks and is present only if passed during the authorization request.
• nonce_supported: A Boolean value that indicates whether the transaction is on a nonce-supported platform. If you sent a nonce in the authorization request but do not see the nonce claim in the ID token, check this claim to determine how to proceed. If this claim returns true you should treat nonce as mandatory and fail the transaction; otherwise, you can proceed treating the nonce as optional.
• email: The user's email address.
• email_verified: A Boolean value that indicates whether the service has verified the email. The value of this claim is always true because the servers only return verified email addresses.
• c_hash: Required when using the Hybrid Flow. Code hash value is the base64url encoding of the left-most half of the hash of the octets of the ASCII representation of the code value, where the hash algorithm used is the hash algorithm used in the alg Header Parameter of the ID Token's JOSE Header. For instance, if the alg is HS512, hash the code value with SHA-512, then take the left-most 256 bits and base64url encode them. The c_hash value is a case sensitive string
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sign_in_with_apple...
[2] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sign_in_with_apple...
How many members of the public think that they have to use their E-mail account password as their password for Apple ID and every other amateur-hour site that enforces this dumb rule?
MILLIONS. I would bet a decent amount of money on it. So if any one of these sites is hacked and the user database is compromised, all of the user's Web log-ins that have this policy are wide open.
Then there's the simple fact that everyone's E-mail address is on thousands of spammers' lists. A simple brute-force attack using the top 100 passwords is also going to yield quite a trove, I'd imagine.
Apple IDs didn't originally have to be E-mail addresses. They're going backward.
If anything, the issue is that third parties treat the email address as a unique, unchangeable identity, and then agree to rely on Apple's assertion of what your email address is. But given how hard identity is - and the challenges in dealing with passwords, account recovery, and name changes at scale - it's a pretty reasonable tradeoff to make.
1. what sign in with apple is
2. sign in with apple is like oauth2
3. there's some bug (not explained) that allows JWTs to be generated for arbitrary emails
4. this bug is bad because you can impersonate anyone with it
5. I got paid $100k for it
> Here on passing any email, Apple generated a valid JWT (id_token) for that particular Email ID.
You need an additional bug on the relying party for this to allow someone to gain access - that they associate the apple account based on the unstable email address claim rather than the stable "sub" claim.
For those not aware, some time ago apple decided it would be a good idea to develop their own sing in system, and then force all apps on their store (that already support e.g. Google Account login) to implement it.
So they brought a huge amount of additional complexity in a large amount of apps, and then they fucked up security. Thank you apple!
A big problem of many apps is that they only had a "log in with google"/"log in with facebook" button, which is very problematic for people who have neither.
On Android this is more acceptable since you need a Google account for the OS itself anyway.
I don't think you do, I'm pretty sure I've skipped that step during device setup on occasion.
https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0-final.html#...
It's likely (although like others have noted, this is scant on details), that this value was correct and represented the authenticated user.
A relying party should not use the email value to authenticate the user.
Not contesting that this is a bug that should be fixed and a potential security issue, but perhaps not as bad.
Anyone else? Am I reading this right?
e.g https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800676 and
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15828767
So I don't get shocked anymore seeing Apple security issues.
Even then, the only "security" that developers had was that the attacker wouldn't know the victim's Apple userId easily. With this zero-day attack, it would have been trivial for many apps to get taken over.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-21/apple-ios...
Looks like Federighi agrees with this diagnosis and tries to improve the overall development process but not sure if it can be really improved without changing the famous secretive corporate culture. At the level of Apple's software complexity, you cannot really design and write a quality software without involving many experts' eyes. And I have been complained by my friends at Apple about how hard to get high level contexts of their works and do a cross-team collaboration.
And IMO, this systematic degradation of the software quality coincides with Bertrand's leaving, who had allowed relatively open culture at least within Apple's software division. I'm not an insider, so this is just a pure guess though.
This defenitly wasn't complex in any shape or form. This was very basic.
That's not how zero-day works
(sign in) with (apple zero day)
which is kind of appealing
I actually think they have a good approach. Rewarding major finds with good payouts and avoiding the flood of info and low level web app ‘bugs’.
Sign in with Apple: zero day flaw
And if I understand this correctly, the issue is in the first API call, where the server does not validate whether the requester owns the Email address in the request.
What confuses me are where're the "decoded JWT’s payload" comes from. Is it coming from a different API call or it's somewhere in the response?
If so, what extra validation did Apple add to patch the bug?
Props to Apple for raising the bar on bounties!
I've had multiple occasions of "Seriously, Apple hired person X? lol" over the past five years or so.
I am not sure if I am understanding the blog post correctly, because its simplicity is beyond ridiculous.
The author even says that Apple found no evidence of it being exploited.
By definition when this blog post was published it was not the 0th day.
In the initial authorization request rather than passing a string with an email address, the caller could pass a boolean `usePrivateRelay`. If true generate a custom address for the third party, if false use the email address on file.
With that one change the implementer no longer has the opportunity to forget to validate the provided email address, and the vuln is impossible.
He could literally send a POST request to that endpoint with arbitrary email addresses and get a valid JWT.
This is clearly explained under the "BUG" section.
But no. Instead they make more proprietary shit without having the basic skills to do so. Then they force that shit on their users.
Is there any bug bounty program for small businesses/apps? I only found hackerone but it seems to be only for enterprise. Is there any recommended platform for small businesses to create their own public bounty program?
Who is implementing that stuff?
Fucking hell. Even after tax, that's a substantial pay-out.
What are they teaching them in computer school these days. How can you write a security function and not test it for these kind of bugs. Unless all there accidental backdoors have a more nefarious purpose <shoosh>
Apple has been spending a lot of money on a security-focused marketing campaign these past few years, and encouraging a high-price payout of $100k is sage marketing.
In that case, you'd catch it way before even implementing the fuzzer.
So in this case, I don't think a fuzzer would have helped. Some E2E tests written by humans should have caught this though.
The headline makes me think the entire problem lies with Apple, when that’s not the case.
> ...affected third-party applications which were using it and didn’t implement their own additional security measures.
While an application could potentially (not that I know exactly how in this case) further verify the received token, that verification is exactly what an authentication service is supposed to provide, hence the responsibility absolutely rests on Apple who provides the service.
Great writeup there. Looks like a Apple JWT bug and the verification went through despite it being 'signed' and 'tamperproof'. Clearly its footguns allowed this to happen, thus JWTs is the gift that keeps on giving to researchers.
What did I just outline days before? [0]. Just don't use JWTs, there are already secure alternatives available.
I've heard criticisms of JWT -- mostly around the lack of ability to revoke a JWT.
One could then introduce a refresh token with a longer ttl, which can be revoked on the server. But of course then you lose some of the statelessness that JWT benefits from.
But still, it seems like a reasonable approach to authentication to me. I can authenticate with several services if need be, and I can check locally if my token is 'likely' valid.
Care to expand why you think one shouldn't use JWT tokens?
What??
They demonstrate no issues with JWTs. There are issues with JWTs, but you have not hit on any of them.
I think we can wrap up the security and anonymous part that Apple has been claiming for their overpriced devices.
Plus, iPhones actually work longer than a year.
Plus I have my Android phone for 3 years now.
The one before that was for 4 years old and priced at 345 €.
At least use a counter argument that is correct.
They don't.
