Facebook spent upwards of $100 million to acquire Israel-based facial recognition firm Face.com on Monday and now a security flaw in the company’s software has been revealed.
The flaw came in the form of Face.com’s mobile app KLIK which allows real-time face-tagging for Facebook pictures. According to researcher Ashkan Saltani the app would grant access to a users private authentication tokens for Facebook and Twitter accounts, allowing hackers to easily gain access to personal photos and other information.
On his personal blog Saltani revealed the flaw after he reported it to Face.com and the issue was fixed.
TECHNICAL DETAILS: Face.com was storing Facebook/Twitter OAUTH tokens on their servers insecurely, allowing them to be queried for *any user* without restriction. Specifically, once a user signed up for KLIK, the app would store their Facebook tokens on Face.com’s server for ‘safe keeping’. Subsequent calls to returns the Facebook “service_tokens” for any user, allowing the attacker to access photos and post as that user. If the KLIK user has linked their Twitter account to KLIK App (say, to ‘tweet’ their photos à la Instagram), their ‘service_secret’ and ‘service_token’ was also returned.
The flaw highlights the exact reason users should be wary when it comes to granting Twitter and Facebook access to third-party apps which in turn can gather certain permissions.
The security issue was so easy to spot that Soltani says he spotted it out of “the corner of my eye.”
Since the flaw was fixed before it was announced users accounts should be safe.
