Welcome to another responsible vulnerability disclosure by Attify team.

This is one of the older bugs which we found to be really interesting and thought could share some of the points with the developer community.

It was the time when every other day – a social startup would spring up. In the race of reaching first to the consumers, developers/managers miss out on one of the key aspect – Security of a Mobile Application .

This application called At The Pool  allowed users to interact with other users based on location and geography. Pretty cool.

Until I realized. Something is really really wrong here.

I fired up Burp Proxy (Read more about how to intercept traffic on a mobile device) and intercepted the traffic.

It was like the old days were coming back – when almost everything you looked at was insecure.

Just to give an example, the URL I was looking at (while having a conversation with another user) looked something like this :

www.example.com/conversations.php?id1=89161&id2=66454

Given that we have a team of Mobile Security experts here at Attify, we don’t miss any issue in a mobile application that we look at.

A Python script was immediately written to iterate over all the values of id1 and id2, and based on the response status, we could determine whether those two persons have ever had a conversation or not.

Also, interestingly, the response content contained the entire conversation history.

For the rest of the details, watch the video below. To secure your Mobile applications from getting hacked, contact us!

 

Thanks AtThePool security team for fixing this vulnerability within a short span of time.

Something which is unexpected to see from the current world startups. Great work guys!

Also, this is quite a long delay between us discovering a vulnerability and posting about it ~ 1.5 years.  Maybe we are working on something awesome . 😉

– Aditya

(Img source : http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/07/social-network-at-the-pool-relaunches-on-mobile-with-an-app-to-better-connect-nearby-friends/)