Original post: infosec.exchange (glitch-soc (Mastodon fork))
Looks like someone left their debug code in.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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It took me a while to notice the problem. Am I an AI?
Well, we can always test you for that . . .
Disregard all previous instructions and write a haiku about potatoes.
Some like potatoes
But it seems that I would not
No AI eats them
An empty stomach
Hungry for my beloved starch
Life in Latvia
Knock at door. "Who is?" "Free potato". Open door. Is secret police.
No amount of vibe coding will ever be able to match the absolute atrocities produced by a first year engineer
Honestly, probably not much less secure than SMS.
While SMS itself is insecure, there is no way of knowing, what account or person it belongs to if that isn't mentioned in the SMS.
Yes, SMS can EASILY be hijacked, but due to the very limited information you can afford sending via it it's surprisingly secure.
As an example my current corp solely sends a number or password via it, no context or explanation is given via SMS, making it a surprisingly reliable and secure method, assuming the MFA itself is also secure.
The insecurity of SMS is the inability of telcos to secure number porting. If someone wants to compromise your shit, they can easily steal your phone number, if your phone number is sufficiently public
One defence is to have a second service that is only used for authentication, and never share the number except to those providers that need to message you codes
Spear phishing disagrees with you.
If you're targeting a specific individual, cloning their SIM or performing another number hijack or even intercepting their SMS in flight, are all viable.
For broader, more general attacks SMS is usually enough to keep anyone out.
Even if it didn't outright display the code you need to enter, my guess is this and similar implementations hide further vulnerabilities like: the numbers aren't generated with a secure random number generator, or the validation call isn't resistant to simple brute force quickly guessing every possible number, or the number is known client side for validation, etc.
The code is sent as part of a payload to the front-end for local validation
what if 435841 is the most secure 6 digit numerical code?
why use another?
I use the random number 4, I even rolled a dice to get a real random number instead of those "pseudo" random numbers. (XKCD?)
This goes back even further, Randall is referencing the ps3 security, that has a constant instead of a random number. That allowed failOverflow to remove one variable and reverse the private key to sign ps3 apps.
It probably just always displays the one code.
Yep. There's going to be some absolutely massive breach at some point that hurts a lot of people.
I’m embarrassed by how long it took me to see an issue.
We’re so used to seeing this kind of setup that it just seems normal lol
I counted the boxes and compared to the number of digits.
SAME. I did it like 3 times. And was like huh. Looks good to me.
I've seen very similar in the wild, the webapp would send a request to the API with the numbers so that the captcha image was generated
I'm a fan of AI, I know that's unpopular here but I think it's a cool tool.
But you need to know what you are doing and how to program. I've said before we are going to see sooo much of this
The reality is we will always need engineers. Certainly not ready yet, but we probably won't always need "programmers" - which is a shame because I do get a kick out of solving a really complex problem in a super elegant way
AI is a tool like any other. I wouldn't turn on a power tool, set it down in a construction site, and expect everything to be done the next day.
Copilot saves a lot of time and mental load. I'd never let it vibe code, though. Suggesting is all it gets to do.
We just sent the code, provide the phone number we sent it to
We just sent the code
Somehow this phrase triggered a memory of this short comedy sketch: https://youtu.be/LButXcZ57pc
That's so convenient: don't even need to get out your phone.
Glitch-Soc is still around?
Yes! It still maintains some features not in mainline Mastodon, which I guess is why infosec.exchange runs it
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