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Comment by justo-rivera | Hacker News Reader

You just need to "register" a subdomain. So basically any google employee has potentially full access to your system?

You’re likely severely underestimating the amount of internal paperwork and review that is required to launch a new google.com subdomain.

Maybe they don't need a new subdomain, something unused could do the trick.

I did one on my local network and didn't fill out anything

But only you have access to your local network.

That's not necessarily true.

Good thing all networks everyone connects to are always known by that user to be secure

Do these APIs not require https?

The case here was just injecting a domain. There's another thread for this post pointing out you would also need to inject a malicious root cert for https traffic, which is correct, but not impossible (and given some bad/lazy practices I've seen places do when they sign their own certs for internal infrastructure, not a far stretch)

If they can do that, they can spoof or proxy any website and collect your passwords, auth cookies, and anything else sent over the network. At that point, who cares if they can also see how much CPU you're using?

I've unlearned over my years that trying to come up with what malicious actors can do under what scenarios and conditions isn't worth the effort, because they are many, know more than me, have different goals than me, and I am one. There's endless permutations of environments and additional weakness or scenarios or a particular sensitivity of information that you don't or can't consider that make some attack really painful. For this case, maybe CPU usage or aggregate changes in CPU usage tips off an attacker on what someone is ramping up internally that can be used for espionage or even timing attacks.

What I have learned in place of that is plug holes to minimize attack vectors.

is your local network google.com ?

I can tell my pc what ca to trust, so yes i can make it to…

So if you can just trick someone into trusting a bogus root CA, take control of their DNS resolution, and get them to open an attacker controlled domain in Chrome then you can... Use this API to get information about their current CPU utilisation.

Wow some attack you got there.

Probably a 'something.google.com'...

But you could have teams with DNS zone delegation who can.create.anything.like.this.google.com

Or anyone who controls your DNS resolution which has a number of paths (for example a local hosts file, possibly a router, changing your config or how you get your config to a malicious DNS server, etc)

or public wifi access point

Not that easy with HSTS.

Also need a cert which is tricky

Won’t work with https.

If that malicious actor can install a custom ca too, they can already install whatever spyware they want.

You'd probably need DNS and Root Certificates, something to which most employers have access

In what world does "system / tab CPU usage, GPU usage, and memory usage" mean "full access to the system"? Any Chrome extension can access this info easily, the point that the tweet makes is that there's a built-in Chrome extension that shares this info with Google's own websites without any confirmation.

What about anything on sites.google.com?

Is it really that easy? I just kind of assumed that devs could create subdomains under a dev TLD like googdev123.com, but not google.com until it was a fully-fledged product release.

Nothing at Google is that easy. It is a large and slow-moving bureaucracy.

Agree. I work at Google. I promise nothing happens quickly. It can take over a week to set up a new SQL database & client. Half coding (don't get me started on boq...) and half data integrity and criticality annotations for the data...

I don't know what setting up a new domain is like but I can't imagine it's something you "just do".

I have no idea what complaints you could possibly have about Boq. It makes you more productive, haven't you heard?

> full access to your system

Only to leak your CPU/GPU utilization though as far as I understand it. Those can also be exposed in other ways by legitimate JS/WebGPU by measuring/profiling shader runs/etc.

Drive.google.com links also work

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