God, I hate security "researchers". If I posted an article about how to poison everyone in my neighborhood, I'd be getting a knock on the door. This kind of shit doesn't help anyone. "Oh but the state-funded attackers, remember stuxnet". Fuck off.

Google, Apple, and rest of big tech are pregnable despite their access to vast amounts of capital, and labor resources.

I used to be a big supporter of using their "social sign on" (or more generally speaking, single sign on) as a federated authentication mechanism. They have access to brilliant engineers thus naively thought - "well these companies are well funded, and security focused. What could go wrong having them handle a critical entry point for services?”

Well as this position continues to age poorly, many fucking aspects can go wrong!

1. These authentication services owned by big tech are much more attractive to attack. Finding that one vulnerability in their massive attack vector is difficult but not impossible.
2. If you use big tech to authenticate to services, you are now subject to the vague terms of service of big tech. Oh you forgot to pay Google store bill because card on file expired? Now your Google account is locked out and now lose access to hundreds of services that have no direct relation to Google/Apple
3. Using third party auth mechanisms like Google often complicate the relationship between service provider and consumer. Support costs increase because when a 80 yr old forgot password or 2FA method to Google account. They will go to the service provider instead of Google to fix it. Then you spend inordinate amounts of time/resources trying to fix issue. These costs eventually passed on to customer in some form or another

Which is why my new position is for federated authentication protocols. Similar to how Lemmy and the fediverse work but for authentication and authorization.

Having your own IdP won’t fix the 3rd issue, but at least it will alleviate 1st and 2nd concerns

Right, but when everyone got phone books, those were only shared locally in the town. It would be pretty hard to figure out someones phone number from across the state/country without the internet unless you knew someone in the town.

You could also pay to be unlisted, which is a luxury long since gone. How cool would it be to make your data 'unlisted' by paying a small monthly fee.

Still are. I got a phone book delivered a week ago, I shit thee not. Granted I'm on a small island and the book is small too. But like, you can pay to have your number removed from the book. Can you have it removed from this? Not to mention all the 2FA stuff that can be connected to the phone number. Someone clones your number or takes it and suddenly they've got access to a whole lot of your login stuff.

Nevermind

It would be even cooler if we had a right to privacy

I think the method of researching and then informing the affected companies confidentially is a good way to do it but companies often ignore these findings. It has to be publicized somehow to pressure them into fixing the problem.

My phone book is smaller than a novel and only has yellow pages these days.

Without researchers like that, someone else would figure it out and use it maliciously without telling anyone. This researcher got Google to close the loophole that the exploit requires before publicly disclosing it.

Casually rotating 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IP addresses to bypass rate limits.

I am not in IT security, but find it fascinating what clever tricks people use to break (into) stuff.

In a better world, we might use this energy for advancing humanity instead of looking how we can hurt each other. (Not saying the author is doing that, just lamenting that ITS is necessary due to hostile actors in this world. )

I think it's important for users to know how vulnerable they really are and for providers to have a fire lit under their ass to patch holes. I think it's standard practice to alert providers to these finds early, but I'm guessing a lot of them already knew about the vulnerabilities and often don't give a shit.

Compared to airing this dirty laundry I think the alternatives are potentially worse.

Pay to have it removed! That sounds like blackmail doxing.

No doubt, lucky us, we get neither...

Phone books from outside my region were available at the library; that place where they store a consolidated collection of books for just anyone to sign out and use.

This disclosure was from last year and the exploit was patched before the researcher published the findings to the public.

If you know how to hurt others, you can learn how to prevent that way of hurting others.

F. This will be moved to an OSINT tool within a week, and scraped into a darkweb database by next Friday.

I did something of the opposite. I had a Verizon number. I moved it to Google voice. I had a second Google voice number that then became a google fi number. So now I have a Verizon coded google voice number (that my bank accepts etc), and a google fi number that was originally a google voice number. I'm curious how this honestly effects me. My work numbers have never been associated with my personal accounts so there's that.

Those are IPv6 addresses that work a bit differently than IPv4. Most customers only get assigned a single IPv4 address, and even a lot of big data centers only have one or two blocks of 256 addresses. The smallest allocation of IPv6 for a single residential customer is typically a contiguous block of the 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses mentioned.

If Google's security team is even marginally competent, they will recognize those contiguous blocks and treat them as they would a single IPv4 address. Every address in that block has the same prefix, and it's actually easier to track on those prefixes than on the entire address.

This doesn't really work in real life since IPv6 rate limiting is done per /64 block, not per individual IP address. This is because /64 is the smallest subnet allowed by the IPv6 spec, especially if you want to use features like SLAAC and privacy extensions (which most home users would be using)

SLAAC means that devices on the network can assign their own IPv6. It's like DHCP but is stateless and doesn't need a server.

Privacy extensions means that the IPv6 address is periodically changed to avoid any individual device from being tracked. All devices on an IPv6 network usually have their own public IP, which fixes some things (NAT and port forwarding aren't needed any more) but has potential privacy issues if one device has the same IP for a long time.