An open(ish) redirect on Mastodon


Cartoon of a tusked mastodon holding a phone.

I've responsibly disclosed a small security issue with Mastodon (GHSA-8982-p7pm-7mqw). It allows a sufficiently determined attacker to use any Mastodon instance to redirect unwary users to a malicious site. What do you think happens if you visit: https://mastodon.social/@PasswordReset/111285045683598517/admin? If you aren't logged in to that instance, it will redirect you to a 3rd party site. Try opening it in a private browser window. Here's another, less convincing, demo: …

Continue reading →

Responsible Disclosure: arXiv - redirect on login


A padlock engraved into a circuit board.

Suppose you are sent a link to a website - e.g. https://example.com/page/1234 But, before you can access it, you need to log in. So the website redirects you to: https://example.com/login?on_success=/page/1234 If you get the password right, you go to the original page you requested. Nice! But what happens if someone manipulates that query string? Suppose an adversary sends you a link like this: https://example.com/login?on_success=https://evil.com A sensible redirection system should say…

Continue reading →

Responsible Disclosure: Abandoned Buckets and Billing Emails


Error saying the bucket does not exit.

A few weeks ago, I received a billing email from my phone provider O2. While glancing at it, I noticed all the images were broken. Viewing the source of the email showed that they were all coming from http:// mcsaatchi-email-preview.s3.amazonaws.com/o2/... What happens if we visit that domain? Ah, the dreaded "The specified bucket does not exist" error. At some point the images were served from that domain but someone deleted the bucket. This is a problem. Amazon doesn't reserve…

Continue reading →

Responsible Disclosure: XSS in Codeberg Pages


An XSS pop up alert on a webpage.

Codeberg is a hip new code hosting site - similar to GitHub and GitLab. And, much like Gits Hub & Lab, users can serve static content through Codeberg pages. Somehow I screwed up my configuration, and when I visited edent.codeberg.page/abc123 I got this error: Now, whenever I see something from the request echoed into the page's source, my hacker-sense starts tingling. What happens if I shove an innocent HTML element into the URl? edent.codeberg.page/abc<em>123 Aha! It lets through…

Continue reading →