What's a company secret you can share now that you no longer work there?

3 years ago by CaspianXI to c/asklemmy

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rtxn 423 points 3 years ago

Our business-critical internal software suite was written in Pascal as a temporary solution and has been unmaintained for almost 20 years. It transmits cleartext usernames and passwords as the URI components of GET requests. They also use a single decade-old Excel file to store vital statistics. A key part of the workflow involves an Excel file with a macro that processes an HTML document from the clipboard.

I offered them a better solution, which was rejected because the downtime and the minimal training would be more costly than working around the current issues.

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bleistift2 27 points 3 years ago

cleartext usernames and passwords as the URI components of GET requests

I’m not an infrastructure person. If the receiving web server doesn’t log the URI, and supposing the communication is encrypted with TLS, which removes the credentials from the URI, are there security concerns?

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nudelbiotop 35 points 3 years ago

Anyone who has access to any involved network infrastructure can trace the cleartext communication and extract the credentials.

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walkwalkwalkwalk 3 points 3 years ago

What do you mean by any involved network infrastructure? The URI is encrypted by TLS, you would only see the host address/domain unless you had access to it after decryption on the server.

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apazzy 13 points 3 years ago

They said clear text, I would assume it's not https.

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walkwalkwalkwalk 7 points 3 years ago

The comment we are replying to is asking about a situation where there is TLS. Also using clear text values in the URI itself does not mean there wouldn't be TLS.

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apazzy 3 points 3 years ago path: 0 1032300 1033128 1036024 1038931 1039618 1043415 1092678, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
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