The Internet is dead! Long live the Internet!

In 1998, L0pht claimed before Congress that in under 30 minutes their seven member group could make online porn and Trek fan sites unusable for several days. (That's all that existed on the Internet in 1998.) In February 2002 an SNMP vulnerability threatened the very fabric of space and time (at least as it related to porn and Trek fan sites -- if you still don't believe me, consider that Google added Klingon language support the same month). More recently, a DNS vulnerability was (somewhat re-)discovered that could enable attackers to redirect traffic going to sites like google.com and wikipedia.com to sites that served porn, even though many people wouldn't notice the difference. (Dan Kaminsky compiled a list of other apocalyptic vulnerabilities that similar issues with those that plagued DNS.)

This year at the OWASP NYC AppSec 2008 Conference Jeremiah Grossman and Robert "RSnake" Hansen shared another vulnerability, clickjacking, in the Voldemort "He Who Must Not Be Named" style. In other words, yet another eschatonic vulnerability existed, but its details could not be shared. This disclosure method continued the trend from Black Hat 2008 prior to which the media and security discussion lists talked about the secretly-held, unsecretly-guessed DNS vulnerability information with the speculation usually retained for important things like when Gn'Fn'R would finally release Chinese Democracy. [If you don't care about gory details of the disclosure drama and just want to skim the abattoir, then read this summary.]

Yet none of these doom-laden vulnerabilities have caused to Internet to go pfft like a certain parrot that need not be named.

Until now.

I've discovered a web-based vulnerability that can be trivially exploited called Cross-Hype Attack Forgery Exploit (CHAFE). It affects all web browsers and can't be patched (nor will you be protected by FireFox's NoScript or using lynx). In fact, if you're reading this entry then I guarantee you can be vulnerable to it. Public release of the details would be self-defeating, but I'm willing to sell the details to the highest bidder -- as well as anyone else who wants to pay for the information. To ensure the validity of this vulnerability, consider that it has both "cross" and "forgery" in the name. So, it clearly has a working exploit associated with it. No peer review is necessary to establish the vulnerability's credibility. To build further confidence, I'll hint that the vulnerability builds on prior research, but who really cares about dusty problems from 1991 when you can have a working exploit in 2008?

Since I haven't gotten around to creating PayPal account yet (although a reminder to update my account information just arrived in my InBox a few moments ago), send an e-mail to chafe@hackculture.com if you're interested in the details and you have some money from which you'd like to be departed.