David Wong

cryptologie.net

cryptography, security, and random thoughts

Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity, research advisor at Archetype, and author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a cryptography architect of Mina at O(1) Labs, the security lead for Libra/Diem at Facebook, and a security engineer at the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. Welcome to my blog about cryptography, security, and other related topics.

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Hacking PayPal Accounts with one click

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An interesting 0day on paypal was discolsed by Yasser Ali.

We have found out that an Attacker can obtain the CSRF Auth which can be valid for ALL users, by intercepting the POST request from a page that provide an Auth Token before the Logging-in process, check this page for the magical CSRF Auth “https://www.paypal.com/eg/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_send-money”. At this point the attacker Can CSRF “almost” any request on behave of this user.

source

A CSRF attacks (Cross-Site Request Forgery) happens when you can send a link to someone (or embed it into an iframe on your website) and it makes the user do something on a particular website (like paypal) that he didn’t intend to do. Or as the name of the attack says, it makes him send a request you forged from outside the website. A CSRF token is used to cancel this attack. It’s usually a random value that is send along the request and verified server side. This value is difficult to predict and thus you usually can’t forge it along the request.

← back to all posts blog • 2014-12-03
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Hacking PayPal Accounts with one click
12-03 blog
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