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Comment by daveguy | Hacker News Reader

In infosec keychains are about as sensitive as private as it gets. They should probably change it to "do not pull or retain any data from any server except that which is explicitly needed to identify the vulnerability" for those who might not understand.

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But I feel like it would have been the same if he got to the point he did and recognized that he had access to keychains. Whether or not he actually accessed them,especially since they weren't auditing (from what I understand), is sort of irrelevant at that point, they would have to be cycled either way.

I understand that they're top secret, but that sort of proves the extent of the vulnerability.

It would have been the same. Bug bounties are for quality of the bug/vulnerability - for instance they find a configuration error that directly affects every server Facebook has open. Or they find a zero day exploit with root capabilities. Those would be million dollar bugs. Facebook definitely needs to clarify that the bounty is for the severity and widespread nature of the bug itself and not an invitaion to penetration testing. They also need to be more explicit about what is not allowed. Maybe they should give bonuses for the value of the target, but the current policy is for the bug itself. He certainly did expose an embarrassing lack of procedure and awareness of key security and that's certainly worth a lot more to Facebook than the bug. However they definitely do not want to encourage penetration testing. And it's infosec code of ethics (probably should be written down somewhere) that when you find a bug you don't use the bug to download anything from the target. It means a lot of people won't be interested because they want to hack and penetration test. To be whitehat about that requires a lot closer communication and contractual obligation.

Facebook needs to get its shit together in key security and clarity of its bounty program. On the other hand this guy writing a blog about downloading a keychain and probing how deep it leads is definitely not responsible infosec.

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