Hacker News Reader

Comment by bearbin | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a cool idea, but I don't feel comfortable giving out my Amazon credentials with no guarantee of how they are used.

View on HN

Agreed. My understanding is that having your password does not necessarily allow someone to see your CC number or order things on your behalf through Amazon, but it definitely does not seem like a best practice to go around handing out one's Amazon password. This sort of thing sounds like a good argument, though, for Amazon's implementing the sort of fine-grained permissions (in conjunction with a federated authentication system like oauth) one finds on twitter, FB, Google, and other services with a well-developed API and ecosystem. I would happily authorize a site like this to view my order history, even if I would not be willing to provide my password.

I wish Amazon would implement this. We see them visiting our site a lot. If you read this, dear Amazon employee, please implement :)

It's in progress: http://login.amazon.com

Also highly risky is AWS. Maybe an attacker can't order diamond rings for themselves, but they certainly could spin up a million EC2 instances to mine bitcoin.

The cost efficiency is terrible of course, but what do they care.

We haven't tested that, but I highly recommend (regardless of using ShelfFlip) to use "Multi-Factor Authentication" for AWS.

While MFA is a great idea and I highly recommend it, it doesn't do anything to prevent API access. :(

How could having your password not allow someone to order things on your behalf? All I need to get into my account is my password, and then I can order anything I want.

If you want to ship to a new address (not in your address book), Amazon requires you to re-input your card number.

Fair point. They can order things on your behalf, but cannot easily order things for THEMSELVES on your behalf since they can't enter a new shipping address without reentering the card number. But that doesn't totally eliminate the risk. They could be prepared to swipe the stuff off your porch when it's delivered (since they could predict when this would be) or they could use their power to simply harass you.

Amazon already has an OAuth solution: http://login.amazon.com

Unfortunately, this only works as a login mechanism comparable to facebook, but doesn't give a site access to your past purchases.

I wonder why more sites don't allow you to create a second read only set of credentials for your account. This would solve a lot of trust issues when using a service like this or say for online banking services like Mint. If you want to stream Netflix/Amazon from an insecure computer would be another use case.

Is there anything we could do to make you (and many more with the same sentiment) more comfortable? We are thinking of writing a blog post of what happens in the background would that help? Any other ideas?

A giant "Why we are asking for this" would be a great start

Just an off-the-top-of-my-head idea: Could you give people a bookmarklet or an extension that they can run when they are on their order history page that exports all the Amazon product IDs?

I was going to write something similar to this. One issue, though, is that it doesn't necessarily track new purchases.

To do that as well, it needs to be an extension and it should also monitor whenever you buy something. If there is a concern that purchases might happen when on another computer, you could allow the user to enter their password into the extension so that the extension can monitor things for you in the background. While users don't have a guarantee that the extension is using the password securely, at least it is possible for the source code to be inspected.

You can actually download your entire order history as a CSV (which is kind of fun -- on the account page, find "Download Order Reports"), which could then be uploaded into this service to get a report on everything you've purchased. The only sensitive information included in the report is name and address.

I'm not sure, but Mint.com seems like a good place to look for ideas. They have somehow persuaded me and millions of others to hand over all our banking passwords.

Gaining this trust, though, will probably not be easy. One advantage a site like Mint has is that they have so much content and so many partnerships that it is clear they are not a scam, have enough at stake to not misuse my information, and probably have the resources to keep it safe. A site like yours, however, could easily have been cobbled together in a number of hours by a scammer. (I don't mean this as a criticism -- I actually like your site. It just doesn't have anything on it to suggest that you are the sort of business I can trust with my passwords.)

Mint also at least initially partnered with Yodlee, and didn't actually doing any of the storing of your passwords themselves.

It helps at this point that Mint itself and its corporate owner Intuit have a long history of reasonably good online security (certainly better than some banks I've used), plus the whole "owned by Intuit" thing gives a solid paper-trail to keep anyone from recourselessly running away in the night with my information.

Is there any OAuth way of authorizing this?

There is no way I'm giving out my Amazon creds which also house AWS, Amazon Payments, Amazon Sellercentral, etc...

Much more cumbersome for users but I see a report option where you can generate .csv's of every item you ordered, maybe those could be uploaded to your service, but unfortunately if I can't use this service without handing over my creds I'm not going to use it.

There is absolutely nothing you could say or do that would make me give you my password. Also, I assume, you need to store it in the clear to use it.

You claim to not have access to credit card information or being able to order something, but I already have to trust you to believe that claim. Also, Amazon could change their policies at any time -- after all you have credentials, Amazon could decide to trust you.

You could definitely verify that claim: 1) Try to extract your credit card from your account 2) Order something to a new address without having to verify your credit card.

You will find that both are not possible

Order something that I don't want to one of my address just for trolling's sake would be annoying too.

Try to extract your credit card from your account

I am not foolish enough to believe that my attackers are no more clever than myself. So whether I can extract my credit card from my account is not useful.

The second one is possible with nothing other than an Amazon order number and some human social engineering; earlier this summer I got hit with someone who gained access to my Amazon order number for an Xbox One (I assume this happened because I was recycling my physical Amazon pack-in invoices [which included the order number] without shredding them), that person chatted with an Amazon CSR and got them to send a replacement order (saying the first never came) and even convinced them to send the replacement to another address that had never been associated with my account (which was a remailer service in Oregon). Even worse, they did this twice (two replacement orders for the same item sent to the same place staggered over 2 days).

I can imagine it would be much, much easier for such social-engineering replacement fraud to happen if someone actually had access to your account with all of its order number data in the clear.

They would be restricted to just reordering things you've already ordered in the past, but I imagine that it doesn't take too many incidents on your account (especially if they figure out you've given your password away freely to a third party) before Amazon shuts you down, with all of the pain associated with that if you're a prime/kindle/etc user.

This seems like a cool service, but there's no way in hell I'm giving anyone my Amazon password for any purpose.

Thanks for the tip on that attack vector- guess I should be shredding those invoices then.

It gets worse: attackers don't even need the paper invoices - at least in 2012, they were social engineering them directly out of Amazon CSRs [0].

[0] http://www.htmlist.com/rants/two-for-one-amazon-coms-sociall...

How about ordering a high-cost item from an attacker who sells on Amazon? How about AWS? How about Amazon Payments to order a service from the attacker's site?

In order to trust you with credentials, it is necessary that you show you have thought everything through. The user needs to know that you will not leak credentials. It's a very high bar. You have simply failed to clear the bar.

I'd try ingesting the order history report one can create at Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

Make this a project I can download and run entirely on my local machine.

> Is there anything we could do to make you (and many more with the same sentiment) more comfortable?

No. Asking people to give out their passwords is fucking horrific. You can't do anything with Amazon, but bad_guy could do something with $other_service and you're just encouraging people to be lazy with passwords.

It's hard enough to get people to choose good passwords and not store them in stupid ways.

Would it help you to know that Shelflip is secured by Norton secured and ex-Google Engineers?

No. You can put anything you want in text or graphics on the screen. You need to send people to a secure amazon.com login page and pass an OAuth token.

I agree. If my Amazon credentials are stolen, here's what I have at risk:

- My credit card details (multiple)

- Shipping / billing addresses

- My private order history 5+ years

- Access to all my AWS instances

- Amazon Cloud Drive data

- And I'm probably forgetting a few...

With that being said, even services like Mint.com require handing over your bank's password to them even today. It's really not a good practice even if they are stored securely.

Tried Shelfflip, minutes later received this email from Amazon:

"Your Amazon.com password has been changed"

This is an important message from Amazon.com.

As a precaution, we've reset your Amazon.com password because you may have been subject to a "phishing" scam.

Here's how phishing works:

A scam artist sends an e-mail, which is designed to look like it came from a reputable company such as a bank, financial institution, or retailer like Amazon.com, but is in fact a forgery. These e-mails direct you to a website that looks remarkably similar to the reputable company's website, where you are asked to provide account information such as your e-mail address and password. Since that web site is actually controlled by the phisher, they get the information you entered.

Go to amazon.com/phish to read more about ways to protect yourself from phishing.

To regain access to your Amazon customer account:

1. Go to Amazon.com and click the "Your Account" link at the top of our website.

2. Click the link that says "Forgot your password?"

3. Follow the instructions to set a new password for your account.

Please choose a new password and do not use the same password you used with us previously.

Thank you for your interest in Amazon.com.

Oh yeah - I checked it out before reading the comments here. Stupidly. Sleep deprivation sucks for cognition.

Got the same exact email...

"Secured by Norton" has about the same ring for me as "nutrition by McDonald's".

How many ex-google engineers are there? Tens of thousands? They can't all be any good.

Word. I am not giving my Amazon credentials to a site that just launched.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com