Another example for “security” by obscurity

Sometimes, you’ll need a catchy example why “security by obscurity” is such a bad idea. Here’s one: “Starring The Admin.”

The gist is that a developer of an application was too lazy to implement proper user roles. So the solution was “if the login has ‘**’ in it, I’ll grant admin rights”. That’s it. Anyone can get admin rights just by appending “**” to their login (the app will remove the “**” from the login before checking the it so no changes to the user database are necessary).

Cool, eh? And so simple!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 19:13 and is filed under Comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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