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GCP CloudSQL Vulnerability Leads to Internal Container Access and Data Exposure
- jorams 3y agoSo this blog post is missing any information about what the actual vulnerabilities were. What was the "gap"? What was the misconfiguration? Also missing is whether access to the host VM exposes meaningful secrets. Does this actually risk customers' sensitive data?
- ec109685 3y agoIt’s marketing for their other products. A pretty annoying read.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y agoYeah this was terrible. First, we did a privilege escalation. How? They don't say. Next, we did another privilege escalation. And how?? They don't say. what's the point of this
- qwertox 3y agoThey skipped all the interesting parts.
- ryanjshaw 3y agoAlso no details about what severity the vulnerability was assessed as. For all we know they got a $10 Play Store voucher because the security boundary is the VM, and SQL customers are already paying for the VM and the rest is convenience so they are considered to be hacking themselves here. Reading this was a waste of time.
- havetocharge 3y agoThere's a big fat NDA attached to the reward.
- abwizz 3y agomaybe security researchers would be well advised to establish a kind of name and shame culture for this NDA with benefits thing that mainly serves to protect corporate interests.
- redwood 3y agoOh boy someone's not going to have a fun long weekend
- dub 3y agoAs the article says, the vulnerability was fixed in April and the people who discovered it have already been rewarded under Google's Vulnerability Reward Program. Google also proactively detected the problem before being notified by the researchers.
- coderintherye 3y agoIt's already been resolved by Google and is not exploitable, so yes hopefully sysadmins using SQL Server on CloudSQL will indeed have an actually fun long weekend.
- yafbum 3y agoIt's responsibly disclosed after the hole is patched.
- tptacek 3y agoThe term of art is "coordinated" disclosure. All sorts of disclosures, with or without vendor consent, can be "responsible", so we try not to use that term, which was coined as a device to give vendors power over researchers.
- yafbum 3y agoAs a customer, I'm glad that both the vendor and the researcher are acting responsibly
- fragmede 3y agoBut I got my pitchfork out and everything!
- jimmyl02 3y agoI'm pretty impressed with the GCP response, both the fact that they identified the behavior and took the first step in reaching out.
- belter 3y agoThe other way to see it, is that it took them 8 days to notice a full compromise of the hosting OS and an open access to Google’s internal docker image repository URL.
- londons_explore 3y agoI'm going to guess that this VM was considered the 'customers' VM as far as security goes... Ie. you couldn't access any other customers data. Likewise, GCP Dataflow quite trivially allows you to escape onto the worker machines and take the (huge) binaries that implement it. They have some really nice detailed status pages!
- lima 3y agoYes. They don't want you to be able to poke around but the real security boundary is the VM, not the database server.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoBack when there was a critical Azure bug that enabled an Azure user to gain access to top-level keys (i.e. the keys to the entire kingdom), a Google engineer commented on an HN thread that Google specifically didn't consider container boundaries secure, so everything is always tied to a VM specific to a customer. The issue with Azure is that a container escape allowed a user to take over the entire Azure subsystem.
- GSGBen 3y agoNot sure if this is still true RE: Azure. AFAIK they use Hyper-V (hypervisor) containers which offer kernel isolation like other lightweight-VM-container runtimes.
- jalk 3y agoI don’t know why, but I was disappointed they didn’t disclose how much the reward was.
- londons_explore 3y agoHopefully not very much... They were 'caught' by googles security team. Who knows - if Google hadn't detected the intrusion, this attack might be on the black market by now.
- tptacek 3y agoProbably not. There's no coherent market for serverside vulnerabilities of any sort.
- belter 3y agoPer their published table, not more than $13,337 https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/6625378258649088/google-and-alphabet-vulnerability-reward-program-vrp-rules https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/6625378258649088/g...
- londons_explore 3y agoRemember that MS SQL server isn't Google code... Any vulnerabilities it may contain they might be powerless to fix. Considering that, Google probably has an extensive monitoring system running in the VM, looking for things happening that shouldn't happen... And they have probably also built a filtering infrastructure between the users and the SQL server so that if any vulnerability is found, they can at least filter attempts to exploit it while a fix is being made.
- drewda 3y agoAccording to the blog post, the vulnerability is not within SQL Server itself, the vulnerability is in the security layer that Google built on top of SQL Server in order to offer it as a managed service on GCP.
- tidbitruminator 3y agoThere is a probably a good reason why they didn't elaborate on this: "Our research began when we identified a gap in GCP’s security layer that was created for SQL Server." It would have been interesting to see how they identified that security gap.
- Havelock 3y agoIt reads like paint two circles... then the rest of the owl.
- Alien2 3y ago[flagged]
- lima 3y agoLast time I checked, their hosted databases run in dedicated VMs, which is where the real security boundary is. Getting access to the host OS won't give you much other than some internal binaries and config.
- cflewis 3y agoI was part of the Cloud SQL team when putting databases in VMs was designed (previously the MySQL process was run in a sandbox). I am sure Cloud SQL is far more advanced since then (9 years ago), but security in depth was something we thought about a lot. Running in a VM for each database rather than a multi-tenant system was for security more than anything else. We could have multi-tenanted just as easily implementation-wise.
- kramerger 3y agoNot a huge fan of Google, but I have always admired how they prioritise security. This would never fly at Amazon because it would cost them a few cents to have anorher VM. Microsoft would probably not even notice the issue.
- scarface74 3y agoAll AWS RDS databases run on a dedicated VM.
- flaminHotSpeedo 3y ago> This would never fly at Amazon because it would cost them a few cents to have anorher VM. That is categorically false. Not only does Amazon's RDS do that (can't find where they say that, might have been at reinvent one year) but for other services like Fargate they used to waste way more resources due to instance single tenancy, until they adopted Firecracker: https://d1.awsstatic.com/events/reinvent/2019/CON423-R1_REPEAT%201%20AWS%20Fargate%20under%20the%20hood_No%20Notes.pdf https://d1.awsstatic.com/events/reinvent/2019/CON423-R1_REPE...
- 3y ago
- AtNightWeCode 3y ago"With access to the operating system, we managed to find some internal Google URLs related to the docker image repository. We could also access the internal repo which later was fixed and the access from non internal IPs was blocked." Fascinating how sloppy some people are when they set up infrastructure even though this may be down to bad defaults.
- speedgoose 3y agoIsn’t the blur effect too light on the screenshots? I may be possible to recompute the /etc/shadow file.
- kccqzy 3y agoAnd what would that accomplish? Knowing the contents of /etc/shadow of a random (virtual) machine that belonged to someone else that you could not access, one that most likely already ceased to exist.
- speedgoose 3y agoIt’s still a bad practice to blur information that supposed to be hidden.
- mcstafford 3y agoThe vulnerability sounds like it's inherent to SQL Server, and that cloud providers haven't been successful in blocking the underlying problem due to its proprietary nature. Presenting it as a Cloud SQL problem is disingenuous.
- nitrammm 3y agoNo? From the article: > we identified a gap in GCP’s security layer that was created for SQL Server. This vulnerability enabled us to escalate our initial privilege and add our user to the DbRootRole role, a GCP admin role. So Google took proprietary software not designed for this use-case and built their own security layer on top of it and ended up with bugs. Of course that's an issue with the service. Presenting it as anything else than an issue in Cloud SQL seems disingenuous.
- breakingcups 3y agoThis article is lacking the actual interesting bit, which is how was the escalation achieved? Just reads like bragging instead of being informative.