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Grammarly has fixed a security bug in its Chrome extension that inadvertently allowed access to a user's account -- including their private documents and data.
Tavis Ormandy, a security researcher at Google's Project Zero who found the "high severity" vulnerability, said the browser extension exposed authentication tokens to all websites.
That means any website can access a user's documents, history, logs, and other data, the bug report said.
"I'm calling this a high severity bug, because it seems like a pretty severe violation of user expectations," said Ormandy, because "users would not expect that visiting a website gives it permission to access documents or data they've typed into other websites."
In proof-of-concept code, he explained how to trigger the bug in four lines of code.
More than 22 million users have installed the grammar-checking extension.
Ormandy filed his bug report Friday, subject to a 90-day disclosure deadline -- as is the industry standard. Grammarly issued an automatic update Monday to fix the issue.
Ormandy has in recent months examined several vulnerable web browser extensions. Earlier this year, he found a remote code execution flaw in the Cisco WebEx Chrome extension, and a data-stealing bug in the popular LastPass password manager.
A spokesperson for Grammarly did not immediately return a request for comment.
Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:
https://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?&tag=DATA-BREACHES
Grammarly has fixed a security bug in its Chrome extension that inadvertently allowed access to a user's account -- including their private documents and data.
Tavis Ormandy, a security researcher at Google's Project Zero who found the "high severity" vulnerability, said the browser extension exposed authentication tokens to all websites.
That means any website can access a user's documents, history, logs, and other data, the bug report said.
"I'm calling this a high severity bug, because it seems like a pretty severe violation of user expectations," said Ormandy, because "users would not expect that visiting a website gives it permission to access documents or data they've typed into other websites."
In proof-of-concept code, he explained how to trigger the bug in four lines of code.
More than 22 million users have installed the grammar-checking extension.
Ormandy filed his bug report Friday, subject to a 90-day disclosure deadline -- as is the industry standard. Grammarly issued an automatic update Monday to fix the issue.
Ormandy has in recent months examined several vulnerable web browser extensions. Earlier this year, he found a remote code execution flaw in the Cisco WebEx Chrome extension, and a data-stealing bug in the popular LastPass password manager.
A spokesperson for Grammarly did not immediately return a request for comment.
Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:
https://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?&tag=DATA-BREACHES