IMPORTANT Security Audit: Issue with XHR requests

Hi all,

A Meteor project i’ve been working on has recently gone in for a security audit at the company I work for; an issue has been flagged which could potentially be an issue for us all.

Below are the descriptions of each issue:

The issue is titled: No Session Management

Basically, after authenticating, Meteor is making XHR requests (if web sockets are disabled or unavailable) to retrieve data which appear to not contain any session identifier. The tester was able to take one of these requests and call it directly using curl and get back data, effectively totally unauthenticated.

As an addendum to the previous note the tester says:

To exploit this particular instance of this issue, there needs to be context for the attacker’s HTTP request to work - if a regular user is browsing the app, an attacker would need to win a race condition against user’s browsing to exploit this particular instance. In addition, the attacker would have to guess the random ID passed in the sockjs URL to retrieve the data. Even though this makes the attacker harder, this shows that the authentication problem is still there. The URL random ID shouldn’t be considered as an auth token in this case, as it is not necessarily considered secure (visible on the screen, remains in logs, opens questions on whether its generated using a secure crypto random number generator).

The request looked something like this:

POST /sockjs/753/a6mm0hqo/xhr HTTP/1.1
Host: myapp.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:48.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/48.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Referer: 应用宝官网-全网最新最热手机应用游戏下载
Connection: close
Content-Length: 0

Yes, if you client is compromised that will become an issue. Because, when you run over HTTPS as supposed, the url is also encrypted. The client first makes a connection to the server, then sends the rest of the url encrypted.

So you cannot be in the middle without hacking the client, the server or breaching https security.

Example wireshark here:

See also: http://info.meteor.com/blog/session-cookies

1 Like

Just providing here the new link to the old blog post about session cookies: