Full Disclosure mailing list archives
RE: TinyURL
From: "Ricky Blaikie" <ricky.blaikie () servercity co uk>
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 17:47:23 -0000
Can we now agree that this is not an ideal medium for passing sensitive information? Surely anyone with an iota of common sense would realise that this would not be a 'good thing(tm)'? Hence, we veer wildly into the 'mostly irrelevant' category ;-) Cheer all, -- Ricky Blaikie - Server City Ltd TEL: 0871 2601000 : FAX: 0871 2601001 : http://www.servercity.co.uk Visit our website for latest offers and pricing or e-mail me. -----Original Message----- From: full-disclosure-admin () lists netsys com [mailto:full-disclosure-admin () lists netsys com]On Behalf Of Kenton Smith Sent: 29 October 2003 17:05 To: Joel R. Helgeson Cc: full-disclosure () netsys com Subject: Re: [Full-disclosure] TinyURL I would say if your passing sensitive information you shouldn't use this service anyway. Even if they randomized it, there's nothing stopping someone from just randomly entering URL's. I'd stumble upon your sensitive information eventually. It's fine for passing news stories and Ebay links, but I wouldn't use it for much else. Kenton On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 04:19, Joel R. Helgeson wrote:
This is an information leak rather than a real vulnerability. I thought it might be of interest to others... www.tinyurl.com is a website that will convert a long url to a short one.
If
you want to email a link to say, driving directions on mapquest, the url
is
rather long and will get broken up. Tinyurl will store that long link, and give you a short one that looks like: http://tinyurl.com/abcd It appears that the last four letters are incremented one letter at a
time,
so my URL may be aaaa, then aaab, and so forth. If people are using the tiny URL service to pass along URL's to sensitive information, it is easy to guess these URL's. I recently sent an email to someone with a tinyurl, and decided to change one character in the url and came across a link to a kiddie porn site... http://tinyurl.com/stab Its a coincidence that stab is a word, but its just a few characters off from my URL, staa & stac are also valid URL's. The TinyURL service should use a randomly created string, rather than one that is incremented by one character. Regardless, users of this service could have the information they intend to share with others viewed by
anyone
that types in the string. Thoughts? Joel R. Helgeson Director of Networking & Security Services SymetriQ Corporation "Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and
he'll
be warm for the rest of his life." _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
_______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Current thread:
- TinyURL Joel R. Helgeson (Oct 29)
- Re: TinyURL Thomas Springer (Oct 29)
- Re: TinyURL Kenton Smith (Oct 29)
- RE: TinyURL Ricky Blaikie (Oct 29)
- Re: TinyURL Joel R. Helgeson (Oct 29)
- Re: TinyURL Martin Schuster (Oct 30)
- Re: TinyURL Josh (Oct 30)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- RE: TinyURL David Klotz (Oct 29)
- Re: TinyURL Troy (Oct 29)
- Re: TinyURL Joel R. Helgeson (Oct 29)
- Re: TinyURL Troy (Oct 29)
- Re: TinyURL Helge Oldach (Oct 29)
- Re: TinyURL Troy (Oct 29)
- RE: TinyURL Bassett, Mark (Oct 29)
- Re: TinyURL John Sage (Oct 29)