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Twitter accept bug
May 12, 2010
If the Twitter accept bug of a couple of days ago really was caused by in-band signaling (and there seems to be few, if any, other reasonable explanations for it), then one has to wonder if we will ever learn from past history.
In-band signaling (mixing control and data on the same communication channel) is famous for being hard to get right and to have caused quite a few security fails in a lot of different domains. Just to list a few well-known cases:
- telephone systems had blue-boxing;
- the C library had format string attacks, essentially because the format argument of
printfand the likes mixes data and control; - Matt Blaze and others found that in-band signaling allows one to evade the presumably secure wiretapping systems used by US law enforcement agencies.
I'll close with the mandatory reference to Bell's corollary:
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
-- George Santayana
Possibly with a handicap
-- Bell
