• bjorney@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    You are acting like someone checked off a “log passwords” box, as if that’s a thing that even exists

    Someone configured a logger to write HTTP bodies and headers, not realizing they needed to build a custom handler to iterate through every body and header anonymizing any fields that may plausibly contain sensitive information. It’s something that literally every dev has done at some point before they knew better.

    • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      It’s something that literally every dev has done at some point before they knew better.

      If you’re working for a multinational tech company handling sensitive user data and still make this mistake, then you are being malicious in your incompetence. This is something that would cause you to lose a significant amount of marks on a first year college programming project, let alone a production system used by literally billions of people.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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      30 days ago

      You should never be sending passwords to a server. That is really bad practice. The right answer is to use cryptography to verify the client knows the password.

      • bjorney@lemmy.ca
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        30 days ago

        Client side verification is just security by obscurity, which gains you very little.

        If someone is capable of MITM attacking a user and fetching a password mid-transit to the server over HTTPS, they are surely capable of popping open devtools and reverse engineering your cryptographic code to either a) uncover the original password, or b) just using the encrypted credentials directly to authenticate with your server without ever having known the password in the first place

        • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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          29 days ago

          That assumes that an adversary has control of the browser. The big reason you don’t want to send passwords over https is that some organizations have custom certs setup. It is better to just not send the password at all.

          • bjorney@lemmy.ca
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            29 days ago

            That assumes that an adversary has control of the browser

            No it doesn’t, if they intercept an encrypted password over HTTPS they can resend the request from their own browser to get access to your account

            The big reason you don’t want to send passwords over https is that some organizations have custom certs setup

            What is the problem with that? The password is secure and only shared between you and the site you are intending to communicate with. Even if you sent an encrypted password, they wrote the client side code used to generate it, so they can revert it back to its plaintext state server side anyways

            It is better to just not send the password at all.

            How would you verify it then?

            If not sending plaintext passwords was best practice then why do no sites follow this? You are literally posting to a site (Lemmy) that sends plaintext passwords in its request bodies to log-in