Returning the OTP in the request API response is wild. Like why?
It’s very sensible and an obvious solution if you don’t think about the security of it.
A dating app is one of the most dangerous kinds of app to make due to all the necessary PII. this is horrible.
This is big brain energy. Why bother needing to make yet another round trip request when you can just defer that nonsense to the client!
But they also said it was a project by two students. And I could absolutely see students (or even normal developers) who aren’t used to thinking about security make that mistake. It is a very obvious way to implement it.
In retrospect I know that my senior project had some giant security issues. There were more things to look out for than I knew about at that time.
When Pinterest's new API was released, they were spewing out everything about a user to any app using their OAuth integration, including their 2FA secrets. We reported and got a bounty, but this sort of shit winds up in big companies' APIs, who really should know better.
I suspect it's a framework thing; they're probably directly serializing an object that's put in the database (ORM or other storage system) to what's returned via HTTP.
Maybe to make it easier to build the form accepting the OTP? Oversight?
I can't think of any other reasons.