Mailing List Archive

Hacking WolframAlpha
Sharing source code with peers is one thing; sharing secrets over a public
medium is another. The all-seeing eye of Google has no mercy, and once the
secret has been seen, indexed, and copied to clone sites, it is no longer a
secret. Now combine the search power of Google with the computational power
of WolframAlpha and the results are limitless! It's raining data from these
saturated clouds, and you just need to hold out your hands for a taste:
http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/hacking-wolframalpha/





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Re: Hacking WolframAlpha [ In reply to ]
This is rather low-hanging fruit. But I suppose someone has to disclose
the low hanging fruit.

Aside from abusing WolframAlpha's API, I'm not sure I see that this is that
huge an accomplishment. I do find it somewhat silly that unobfuscated
appid's are passed to the API over an unsecured connection, but meh. My
access to the API getting cut would be an annoyance, and I would certainly
be non-plussed about that if I were one of the poor souls who paid for a
bigger better faster stronger query plan, but still, meh. Maybe I'm
missing out on the gravity of this by not using the WolframAlpha API.

Of course, I'm assuming the real point here *is* that the appid is passed
unobfuscated and unsecured, and *not* that I can go trawling for appid's on
Google. The former is somewhat interesting to the niche of WolframAlpha
API users. The latter is rather old news under the heading "I can find a
disturbing amount of private information using a properly formatted Google
query". Patching that vulnerability will only be accomplished
through reeducation and strategic employment modifications.

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 2:50 PM, Adam Behnke <adam@infosecinstitute.com>wrote:

> Sharing source code with peers is one thing; sharing secrets over a public
> medium is another. The all-seeing eye of Google has no mercy, and once the
> secret has been seen, indexed, and copied to clone sites, it is no longer a
> secret. Now combine the search power of Google with the computational power
> of WolframAlpha and the results are limitless! It's raining data from these
> saturated clouds, and you just need to hold out your hands for a taste:
> http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/hacking-wolframalpha/
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
> Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html
> Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
>