RCE As a Feature

The opposite of meritocracy is kakistocracy: the worst and least-qualified are the ones who rise to the top.

Get real familiar with that word, dear readers. I think you'll need it.

If anyone can back me up on this, it's our submitter, Jared B:

I am a teacher by profession, and worked for a year at an ed-tech company founded by a mechanical engineering professor, Harry. Harry had spent a great deal of time in the 90's developing a C interpreter (yes, you read that right). 30 years later, he remained convinced that his interpreter was the technology of the future, and had founded a company that offered math and computer science curriculum to K-12 students based on C programming. Originally, he had written a textbook that introduced students to programming using a locally-installed version of his interpreter and custom IDE. A little vain, but no serious problems. As Chromebooks grew popular in schools, he had developed a web IDE where students could write and run C code. But Harry could never give fully give up on the Windows IDE for his C interpreter. So, he included in the web version a "Run Locally" button for those school computers still running Windows. It worked like so: installing the interpreter and IDE locally would also install a daemon that activated on startup and ran a websocket server. This server had an endpoint which accepted as a parameter a string of C code. It would then pass this C code to the locally-installed interpreter to run. As you might suspect, there was no authentication whatsoever on this local websocket server. Knowing the form of the protocol, ANY domain could connect to localhost:12345/execute_c_program and send arbitrary code to run (of course, Harry prided himself on the completeness of his C implementation, including execv() and the like). Trick a user into visiting a malicious website, and you automatically had RCE on their computer. Adding insult to injury, I discovered that the server was bound to 0.0.0.0 so that if you had Harry's software (/malware) installed, any computer on the same network as you could send you arbitrary C code to execute without question. These vulnerabilities had existed for several years before I joined the company. In all that time, Harry had never hired anybody but his own grad students as software developers, and none of them had noticed the problem. By that time, the software was installed on thousands of school-owned computers throughout the state. I documented and demonstrated the vulnerabilities to Harry. He did release a new version of the software addressing the issues and citing "security improvements" in the release notes, but there was never a communication to school/district IT leaders to describe the importance of updating. I suspect that Harry should be in serious legal trouble for potentially compromising data related to schools and minors, but I've since moved on and dropped the subject. During the year I spent at the company (not in any sense as a dev, mind you, but as a lowly curriculum writer), I also discovered and reported a cookie-stealing exploit that would have compromised student and teacher data, as well as a code injection on another of Harry's websites (he decided to demonstrate that his C interpreter could work as a web server via a page where a user could type a math expression, which was then eval()ed server-side without any sanitation). The latter vulnerability gave me remote access, where I discovered thousands of transaction records that included credit card information stored in the clear. Harry's company is still in business to this day, and has recently been ranked in TIME's list of top American ed-tech companies. Oh, and the office router's admin page still had the default Google-able username and password, but that one's a freebie.

I knew someone like this once, only they were stuck on ColdFusion long after everyone else stopped caring about it. However, I don't think they went on to endanger an entire state's educational system, only to be lauded as a visionary leader. Can't say for sure, though.

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