this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
856 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
59534 readers
3199 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
their page to link accounts to it was not a real webapp, it was a novnc page that would connect to an ubuntu vm that runs chrome with no sandboxing and basic password store under fluxbox wm
someone dumped the home directory from it
Holy shit, that's actually hilarious, I imagine someone would have noticed when their paste/auto type password managers didn't work
For those confused, this sounds like instead of making a real website, they spin up a vm, embed a remote desktop tool into their website and have you login through chrome running on their VM, this is sooooo sketch it, its unreal anyone would use this in a public product.
Imagine if to sign into facebook from an app, you had to go to someone else's computer, login and save your credentials on their PC, would that be a good idea?
What I don’t understand is why. This sounds like way more work than spinning up some out-of-the-box framework with oAuth or a Google login and hosting it on Lambda or Azure. What is logging in on a VM box even going to do for the device?
I've looked it up and it's even uglier and I can kinda understand why they did it this way Basically, for their "integrations" they aren't using any official APIs. Instead they just use the websites and automate them via the Playwright framework. So for each user they have a VM running with a Chrome browser to access the services. So now they have the problem that they need to get their users session cookies into the browser. And the easiest solution for that is having the users access their VM via VNC and just log into the automated browser.
This is such a hacky solution that I'm actually in awe of it's shittiness. That's something you throw together in an all-nighter during a Hackathon, not a production ready solution
Well that's horrific.
I wish I knew what any of this meant…
It basically implies that they cobbled together some standard technology but they didn't even put it together very well.
It's like a solution that's held in place with chewing gum and Band-Aids.
The "login" was actually a browser based remote access tool. You were signing in on a machine on there network running Chrome.
Someone dumped the contents of that machine.