On Twitter’s OAuth Fix

While the OAuth team is working on addressing the OAuth session fixation vulnerability at the spec level, Twitter made following changes to reduce the exposure window:

  • Shorter Request Token timeout – This is good practice in general. Developers tend to be too generous and, all too often, forget to enforce or verify enforcement.
  • Ignore oauth_callback, in favor of URL set at regration time – this prevents hackers from intercepting callback.

Double-callback is still possible though which means Twitter OAuth Consumers will have to detect extraneous callbacks and invalidate access to everyone involved because they have no way of telling who is who.

Remaining exposure to the vulnerability is when hacker’s simulated callback arrives before the user. We are talking temporal exposure of a couple of seconds at most which, given current Twitter use-cases, is not that big a deal. I wouldn’t do banking over Twitter though. đŸ˜‰