'Covert Redirect' OAuth floaw more chest-beat than Heartbleed

A recently reported new "vulnerability" in OAuth appears to be anything but.

That unkind assessment has come from security specialists after a flaw called "Covert Redirect" made headlines that conflated the flaw with the Heartbleed vulnerability, a major security risk that legitimately sent administrators scrambling to fix their websites.

PhD student Wang Jing from Nanyang Technological University reported the flaw Saturday and showed how it allowed attackers to phish users and obtain their tokens. In videos, he demonstrated how the trick applied to the OAuth implementation in Facebook where OAuth tokens were sent to a malicious site.

OAuth 2.0 websites were affected including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, Jing said. Websites using the platform issued login requests to authentication sites like Google and Facebook which then prompted users to log in. An access code was subsequently handed over by redirecting the users' browser to a URL from the requesting website with codes passed in URL parameters.

User pwnage occurred when open redirects shipped off the information to any URL in the parameters. Dell authorisation architect Danny Thorpe explained the attack in the example: "https://example.com/redirect/?&original_page=http://evil.com/gotcha". The severity of the redirect flaw was far less than that suggested in initial breathless media reports because it required attackers found a susceptible application, then con users into clicking bad links and authorising permissions.

Further details are here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/0...s_overt_hype_more_heartbleat_than_heartbleed/