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Finding a $5,000 Google Maps XSS by fiddling with Protobuf

304 points| mar1 | 9 years ago |medium.com | reply

18 comments

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[+] hartator|9 years ago|reply
I still think $5,000 is ridiculously low. Lots of research like this fails and it happens you do the work just to be told someone already filled a similar bug before.
[+] bwblabs|9 years ago|reply
Pretty elaborate research indeed, I once filed a very simple, but just as dangerous, stored XSS on www.linkedin.com (with access to cookies) + some other bug, hoping to speedup my Partner API Request, got $400 for the XSS and many weeks later $400 for the other bug too (which took them 6+ months to fix). The $/time wasn't worth it, and of course the Partner API Request got declined without explanation.
[+] danielweber|9 years ago|reply
It seems to be the market clearing price. Lots of companies think "hey, we offer peanuts and people do all this expensive work for us."

This guy did it to land a job. Hopefully he's done with spec-work like this and his new employer makes sure to negotiate rates ahead of time for security reviews.

[+] hgears|9 years ago|reply
Fantastic analysis of a complex system. Congrats on the bounty! +1 for dropping that you're looking for work at the end, that's a great resume post.
[+] scriptsmith|9 years ago|reply
Fantastic write-up. Scripting with Chrome's debug tools seems to be a promising way to find exploits among minified js.
[+] n13|9 years ago|reply
Just wondering if anybody from Google asked you to apply for positions there after this?
[+] timdierks|9 years ago|reply
@mar1, I've forwarded your interest in finding a job to our security recruiting lead. We don't have a relevant office in the desired location, but happy to discuss. Feel free to reach out, my email is [email protected].
[+] mpeg|9 years ago|reply
Very clever use of the Chrome debugger APIs.

We should connect, my company doesn't have anyone fully remote right now but maybe we could do in the near future...

[+] nicoboo|9 years ago|reply
Well done and well explained. Great thing to share your thoughts in open-source as well. I wish you the best with your job research, companies like Advance or Octo would be great places for you in France, based on the skills you showed.
[+] z3t4|9 years ago|reply
Do you always get the bounty ? Or do they sometimes fix the bug and ignore you ?
[+] lindgrenj6|9 years ago|reply
Very cool! I didn't know that chrome's debug tools were so powerful.
[+] hamilyon2|9 years ago|reply
Could this type of vunerability be found using some clever fuzzer?
[+] CorvusCrypto|9 years ago|reply
A lot of vulnerabilities like this are found with fuzzing. Same with poor encryption schemes. Depends what your definition of clever is but normally fuzzing is an intermediate research step to just see what response you get as you change input to ascertain information of what's going on behind the scenes so you can use a more directed attack later.
[+] otterley|9 years ago|reply
Nice work, Marin. Great detail on your methods and findings.