There are a lot of major security vulnerabilities in the world that were made understandably, and can be forgiven if they're handled responsibly and fixed.
This is not one of them. In my opinion, this shows a kind of reputation-ruining incompetency that would convince me to never use Arc ever again.
I agree & disagree.
Browsers are very important part of our life. If someone compromises our browsers , they basically compromise every single aspect of privacy and can lead to insane scams.
And because arc browser is new , they wanted to build fast and so they used tools like firebase / firestore to be capable of moving faster (they are a startup)
Now I have read the article but I am still not sure how much of this can be contributed to firebase or arc
- Firebase allows for easy misconfiguration of security rules with zero warnings
- This has resulted in hundreds of sites exposing a total of ~125 Million user records, including plaintext passwords & sensitive billing information
So because firebase advocates itself to the developers as being safe yet not being safe , I think arc succumbed to it.
firestore has a tendency to not abide by the system proxy settings in the Swift SDK for firebase, so going off my hunch,
Also , you say that you have been convinced to never use arc again.
Did you know that chrome gives an unfair advantage to its user sites by giving system information (core usage etc.) and some other things which are not supposed to be seen by browsers only to the websites starting with *.google.com ?
this is just recently discovered , just imagine if something more serious is also just waiting in the shadows
Couldn't this also be considered a major security vulnerability just waiting to be happen if some other exploit like this can be discovered / google.com is leaked and now your cpu information and way more other stuff which browsers shouldn't know is with a malicious threat actor ?
Also, firebase? seriously? this is a company with like, low level software engineers on payroll, and they are using a CRUD backend in a box. cost effective I guess? I wouldn't even have firebase on the long list for a backend if I were architecting something like this. Especially when feature-parity competitors like Supabase just wrap a normal DBMS and auth model.
> low level software engineers on payroll
How does The Browser Company make money? They're giving their product away for free.
Browsers are complicated. It doesn't inspire confidence that the folks in charge of that complexity can't get their heads around a business model.
(Aside: none of their stated company values have anything to do with the product or engineering [1]. They're all about how people feel.)
You’d think that a company shipping a browser would pay a little more attention to security rules.
Also, shame on firebase for not making this a bit more idiot proof.
And really? $2500? That’s it? You could’ve owned literally every user of Arc… The NSA would’ve paid a couple more zeros on that.
Are there a lot of Arc users? It seems like a pretty niche browser even compared to other niches.
Lots of developers and power users make a good chunk of Arc's use base. If you're after some interesting credentials then "every Arc user" is a perfect group with little noise.
> power users
Not that many. Most power users don't like to be forced for logging in, before they are able to use the browser.
If I had to guess, the typical Arc user is a Mac user in tech. It doesn't run on Linux, most windows users wouldn't run it, and non-tech people haven't heard of it.
Then most engineering IC people will most likely run Firefox or Chrome, so you're probably looking at designers/founders/managers as your target.
Probably some interesting targets there, but not the type that the NSA cares about. Just pure conjecture on my part of course ;).
The only person I ever saw using Arc was a designer at a tech startup, so this checks out.
confirmed
i don't even like logging in WHILE using the browser and have never heard of arc
Having arbitrary browser access would be pretty valuable, even for just a small number of users.
The page says $2,000.
I just wanted to say, I enjoyed the little pixel art cat that runs towards wherever you click immensely. It’s one of those fun, whimsical little touches that I don’t see all that often. A reminder that the internet can be a fun, whimsical place if we want it to be :)
As I didn’t get that, it seems like the dev honors prefers-reduced-motion, and doesn’t display it in that case. Excellent of them, give joy to those who want it, prevent annoyances for those who hate them.
Can we have Arc added to the title of the post to better alert people who use or know people who use the browser?
This is such a fantastic bug. Firebase security rules (like with other BaaS systems like Firebase) have this weird default that is hard to describe. Basically, if I write my own API, I will set the userId of the record (a 'boost' in this case) to the userId from the session, rather than passing it in the request payload. It would never even occur to a developer writing their own API past a certain level of experience to let the client pass (what is supposed to be) their own userId to a protected API route.
On the other hand, with security rules you are trying to imagine every possible misuse of the system regardless of what its programmed use actually is.
> On the other hand, with security rules you are trying to imagine every possible misuse of the system regardless of what its programmed use actually is.
Tbh you're doing it wrong if you go that way.
Default deny, and then you only have to imagine the legitimate uses.
According to this article, Arc requires an account and sends Google's Firebase the hostname of every page you visit along with your user ID. Does this make Arc the least private web browser currently being used?
For context: what is this 'arc' that the blog post mentions? I presumes it's not Paul Graham's Lisp dialect in this context?
EDIT: seems to be a browser or so?
Yes it's a new browser who tries to change the UX from traditional browsers: https://arc.net/
OP is talking about the Arc browser, not the Arc language, the Arc "Atomic React" project, or any of scores of other projects with that name.
I'm definitely not the target audience... Even after reading the faq I have no idea what it does
$2000 is an insulting amount for such a huge vuln
Yeah, you have to have some solid backbone not to sell this off to some malicious party for 20-50x that amount...
Am I too optimistic? I feel like most regular people I know wouldn’t sell this off. Most people are not antisocial criminals by nature, and also wouldn’t know how to contact a “state actor” even if they wanted to.
A malicious party who wants a vulnerability in a browser effectively nobody uses?
Nice article, but this is hard to read without proper capitalization. My brain uses capitals to scan beginning and ending of text.
If you were using Arc you could add a Boost for "Case: toggle between different capitalization settings - they will apply to all text on the webpage" [1]
Great research. As I've said elsewhere, Firebase's authentication model is inherently broken and causes loads of issues, and people would be better off writing a small microservice or serverless function that fronts Firebase.
Also, for anyone trying to read the article, they should put `/oneko.js` in their adblocker.
> Also, for anyone trying to read the article, they should put `/oneko.js` in their adblocker.
Only if you hate cats, pixel art, or are easily distracted.
I suspect it's that they hate are easily distracted (if "hate" falls outside of the series, such that it applies beyond just "cats")!
Looks like someone already added it to uBlock Origin since I see no cat.
Or maybe the cat doesn't support Firefox...
I use uBlock Origin and Firefox (on Mac) and see the cat.
Did you enable the ui.prefersReducedMotion setting? That hides the cat from what I can tell
Hmm not that I remember. But I have reduced motion enabled on my phone system wide and maybe that synced to my desktop on its own.
Which is scary come to think of it.
I’m ashamed I fell for Arc and even recommended it to my friends, as someone whose job is exactly this but with Android apps :(
the developers working with firebase should enforce common-sense document crud restrictions in the rules. that's just how firebase is. everyone knows it.
now, when talking about ARC BROWSER, i am seriously starting to doubt the competence of the team. I mean, if the rules are broken (no tests? no rules whatsoever?), what else is broken with ARC? are we to await a data leak from ARC?
any browser recommendations with proper vertical tabs and basically everything working like it does in ARC?
Did you took a look at the zen browser?
It's an arc clone based on Firefox
https://zen-browser.app/
Start -> Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> Search 'Arc' -> Uninstall.
I wish we didn't have to sign up to use a browser in the future
just don't use browsers that do
while researching, i saw some data being sent over to the server, like this query everytime you visit a site
I'm not surprised in the least --- basically the vast majority of software these days is spyware. Looking at Arc's privacy page, it appears to be mainly marketing fluff similar to what I've seen from other companies. I have yet to find a privacy policy that says frankly "we only know your IP and time you downloaded the software, for the few weeks before the server logs are overwritten."
Yeah, and no mention of if they addressed this.
This is a nice investigation and a great read. Sad that they don't normally do bug bounties. $2000 seems small considering the severity of this vulnerability. Though I guess the size and finances of the company is a factor. It takes some serious skills, effort and luck to discover something like that. It should be well compensated.
Article great, cute doge
even better. Here's my upvote!
HN tends to be a little hard on brief comments. My current understanding is that comments with little substance are totally acceptable provided they're good natured.
Also from the guidelines "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive": this post's topic doesn't likely qualify as divisive.
There are a lot of major security vulnerabilities in the world that were made understandably, and can be forgiven if they're handled responsibly and fixed.
This is not one of them. In my opinion, this shows a kind of reputation-ruining incompetency that would convince me to never use Arc ever again.
I agree & disagree.
Browsers are very important part of our life. If someone compromises our browsers , they basically compromise every single aspect of privacy and can lead to insane scams.
And because arc browser is new , they wanted to build fast and so they used tools like firebase / firestore to be capable of moving faster (they are a startup)
Now I have read the article but I am still not sure how much of this can be contributed to firebase or arc
On the following page from same author (I think) https://env.fail/posts/firewreck-1 , tldr states
- Firebase allows for easy misconfiguration of security rules with zero warnings
- This has resulted in hundreds of sites exposing a total of ~125 Million user records, including plaintext passwords & sensitive billing information
So because firebase advocates itself to the developers as being safe yet not being safe , I think arc succumbed to it.
firestore has a tendency to not abide by the system proxy settings in the Swift SDK for firebase, so going off my hunch,
Also , you say that you have been convinced to never use arc again.
Did you know that chrome gives an unfair advantage to its user sites by giving system information (core usage etc.) and some other things which are not supposed to be seen by browsers only to the websites starting with *.google.com ?
this is just recently discovered , just imagine if something more serious is also just waiting in the shadows Couldn't this also be considered a major security vulnerability just waiting to be happen if some other exploit like this can be discovered / google.com is leaked and now your cpu information and way more other stuff which browsers shouldn't know is with a malicious threat actor ?
Also, firebase? seriously? this is a company with like, low level software engineers on payroll, and they are using a CRUD backend in a box. cost effective I guess? I wouldn't even have firebase on the long list for a backend if I were architecting something like this. Especially when feature-parity competitors like Supabase just wrap a normal DBMS and auth model.
> low level software engineers on payroll
How does The Browser Company make money? They're giving their product away for free.
Browsers are complicated. It doesn't inspire confidence that the folks in charge of that complexity can't get their heads around a business model.
(Aside: none of their stated company values have anything to do with the product or engineering [1]. They're all about how people feel.)
[1] https://thebrowser.company/values/
You’d think that a company shipping a browser would pay a little more attention to security rules.
Also, shame on firebase for not making this a bit more idiot proof.
And really? $2500? That’s it? You could’ve owned literally every user of Arc… The NSA would’ve paid a couple more zeros on that.
Are there a lot of Arc users? It seems like a pretty niche browser even compared to other niches.
Lots of developers and power users make a good chunk of Arc's use base. If you're after some interesting credentials then "every Arc user" is a perfect group with little noise.
> power users
Not that many. Most power users don't like to be forced for logging in, before they are able to use the browser.
If I had to guess, the typical Arc user is a Mac user in tech. It doesn't run on Linux, most windows users wouldn't run it, and non-tech people haven't heard of it.
Then most engineering IC people will most likely run Firefox or Chrome, so you're probably looking at designers/founders/managers as your target.
Probably some interesting targets there, but not the type that the NSA cares about. Just pure conjecture on my part of course ;).
The only person I ever saw using Arc was a designer at a tech startup, so this checks out.
confirmed
i don't even like logging in WHILE using the browser and have never heard of arc
Having arbitrary browser access would be pretty valuable, even for just a small number of users.
The page says $2,000.
I just wanted to say, I enjoyed the little pixel art cat that runs towards wherever you click immensely. It’s one of those fun, whimsical little touches that I don’t see all that often. A reminder that the internet can be a fun, whimsical place if we want it to be :)
As I didn’t get that, it seems like the dev honors prefers-reduced-motion, and doesn’t display it in that case. Excellent of them, give joy to those who want it, prevent annoyances for those who hate them.
Same for me, on FF you can override it with:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...On Debian, you can install and run the cat with
Makes a great gift for colleagues who leave their computer unattended.It's doing great for being a 35-year-old cat!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)
On desktop it follows the mouse no need to click.
Can we have Arc added to the title of the post to better alert people who use or know people who use the browser?
This is such a fantastic bug. Firebase security rules (like with other BaaS systems like Firebase) have this weird default that is hard to describe. Basically, if I write my own API, I will set the userId of the record (a 'boost' in this case) to the userId from the session, rather than passing it in the request payload. It would never even occur to a developer writing their own API past a certain level of experience to let the client pass (what is supposed to be) their own userId to a protected API route.
On the other hand, with security rules you are trying to imagine every possible misuse of the system regardless of what its programmed use actually is.
> On the other hand, with security rules you are trying to imagine every possible misuse of the system regardless of what its programmed use actually is.
Tbh you're doing it wrong if you go that way.
Default deny, and then you only have to imagine the legitimate uses.
According to this article, Arc requires an account and sends Google's Firebase the hostname of every page you visit along with your user ID. Does this make Arc the least private web browser currently being used?
For context: what is this 'arc' that the blog post mentions? I presumes it's not Paul Graham's Lisp dialect in this context?
EDIT: seems to be a browser or so?
Yes it's a new browser who tries to change the UX from traditional browsers: https://arc.net/
OP is talking about the Arc browser, not the Arc language, the Arc "Atomic React" project, or any of scores of other projects with that name.
https://arc.net/faq
I'm definitely not the target audience... Even after reading the faq I have no idea what it does
$2000 is an insulting amount for such a huge vuln
Yeah, you have to have some solid backbone not to sell this off to some malicious party for 20-50x that amount...
Am I too optimistic? I feel like most regular people I know wouldn’t sell this off. Most people are not antisocial criminals by nature, and also wouldn’t know how to contact a “state actor” even if they wanted to.
A malicious party who wants a vulnerability in a browser effectively nobody uses?
Nice article, but this is hard to read without proper capitalization. My brain uses capitals to scan beginning and ending of text.
If you were using Arc you could add a Boost for "Case: toggle between different capitalization settings - they will apply to all text on the webpage" [1]
/s
[1] https://resources.arc.net/hc/en-us/articles/19212718608151-B...
this made me laugh. 10/10
Great research. As I've said elsewhere, Firebase's authentication model is inherently broken and causes loads of issues, and people would be better off writing a small microservice or serverless function that fronts Firebase.
Also, for anyone trying to read the article, they should put `/oneko.js` in their adblocker.
> Also, for anyone trying to read the article, they should put `/oneko.js` in their adblocker.
Only if you hate cats, pixel art, or are easily distracted.
I suspect it's that they hate are easily distracted (if "hate" falls outside of the series, such that it applies beyond just "cats")!
Looks like someone already added it to uBlock Origin since I see no cat.
Or maybe the cat doesn't support Firefox...
I use uBlock Origin and Firefox (on Mac) and see the cat.
Did you enable the ui.prefersReducedMotion setting? That hides the cat from what I can tell
Hmm not that I remember. But I have reduced motion enabled on my phone system wide and maybe that synced to my desktop on its own.
Which is scary come to think of it.
I’m ashamed I fell for Arc and even recommended it to my friends, as someone whose job is exactly this but with Android apps :(
the developers working with firebase should enforce common-sense document crud restrictions in the rules. that's just how firebase is. everyone knows it.
now, when talking about ARC BROWSER, i am seriously starting to doubt the competence of the team. I mean, if the rules are broken (no tests? no rules whatsoever?), what else is broken with ARC? are we to await a data leak from ARC?
any browser recommendations with proper vertical tabs and basically everything working like it does in ARC?
Did you took a look at the zen browser? It's an arc clone based on Firefox https://zen-browser.app/
Start -> Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> Search 'Arc' -> Uninstall.
I wish we didn't have to sign up to use a browser in the future
just don't use browsers that do
while researching, i saw some data being sent over to the server, like this query everytime you visit a site
I'm not surprised in the least --- basically the vast majority of software these days is spyware. Looking at Arc's privacy page, it appears to be mainly marketing fluff similar to what I've seen from other companies. I have yet to find a privacy policy that says frankly "we only know your IP and time you downloaded the software, for the few weeks before the server logs are overwritten."
Yeah, and no mention of if they addressed this.
This is a nice investigation and a great read. Sad that they don't normally do bug bounties. $2000 seems small considering the severity of this vulnerability. Though I guess the size and finances of the company is a factor. It takes some serious skills, effort and luck to discover something like that. It should be well compensated.
Article great, cute doge even better. Here's my upvote!
The dog is actually a cat named Neko.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)
To be clear, it's a cat named "cat" in Japanese.
I got downvoted for calling it a dog??
Now that's ruff!!
Good pun :)
HN tends to be a little hard on brief comments. My current understanding is that comments with little substance are totally acceptable provided they're good natured.
For example this comment by dang "There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks."" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37251836.
Also from the guidelines "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive": this post's topic doesn't likely qualify as divisive.