Friday 24 September 2010

I'm very disappointed to report that it works

A friend of mine was recently reviewing a friend's CV, and noted he had an ethical hacking qualification. I found this rather amusing, since I know there are a gazillion unqualified, uncertified hackers (and simply curious people) who I'd much, much rather be on some kind of radar. It reminds me of the DRM/DMCA debate: it's the ones not following the rules that tend to get the benefit, or at least know enough about the rules to not care about enforcement.

I have been having a series of discussions with a few security specialists in the last two weeks, and they've put a few seeds in my brain. I've reviewed a few articles about application vulnerabilities, and with more and more of the world moving into "the cloud" (btw, I hate that phrase) we're handing over more control to this nebulous entity. Google are definitely at the front, at least as far as end-user experience goes. Heck, I'm hosting this very blog on Google's servers, and neither know nor care where they are.

I also recently acquired an Android phone, and allowed Google's hooks into my life to sink just that bit deeper with integrated messaging, contacts, calendaring, apps I really don't need, Facebook on-the-go, Twitter... it's all cloud! I left my laptop at a friend's house recently, and realised (to my own shock) that frankly, I can live without it for a day or two, such is the functionality in this great new device.

So while all the focus is off in the cumulo-nimbus, I'm still dealing with daily life that's hosted and automated on some providers that are definitely well-defined. My bank is one of them, and as an extra I do some share dealing with their attached brokerage. Side note: three years ago I had spare cash and thought "what's safer than banks?".

Today, I placed an order to sell a few shares and received an order number. I recalled a conversation with one of these specialists about session identifiers where we discussed collision avoidance and non-sequentialness as two good markers for session tracking. On a whim, I took the URL generated by the transaction ID to view details and incremented the trade identifier by one digit.

Lo and behold, I got the details of someone else's trade. One thousand shares of an oil company, concluded around the same time as mine. Alarmed, I did it again, this time decrementing (I'd hit an upper bound), and found an incomplete trade. This is an order, as yet unfulfilled, awaiting the conditions set by the initiator. Now granted, i couldn't see the identity of the trader (in either case), so perhaps on the surface not such a big deal. But, if you know dealing, complete trades are not so significant as they are done and dusted, while incomplete trades show intention. Script this query for current and future IDs, and you could get a feel for investor sentiment that gives you an advantage.

I've been using this particular trading system for years, and regardless of the losses I've made (seriously, I have no aptitude for this) thought of the security measures as fairly robust: SSL encryption, separate login and dealing password both never revealed in full, limits on trading volume by account type and history, approved browser versions only. How easily we are placated.

Handing over so much of our personal info into the (at least free) cloud scares me, though I'm conscious of the fact that free products are, in the sage words of my father, worth what you paid for them. Paid services may not fare much better; by abstracting services into this fog, we run the risk of losing touch with how services are delivered, how we control them, and what we stand to lose if it all goes wrong.

But most of all, they're still built and run to the same rules as traditional systems, no matter how abstractly they're presented. The same DBMSs, the same web servers and runtimes, the same developers and critically the same developer mentalities.

A sobering lesson indeed.

Oh, and yes I raised this with the brokerage concerned. Does that get me the ethical badge?

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