[hn_throwaway_99]

I mean, I don't think it's that hard to surmise how something like this could have happened. Yes, the bug is egregiously bad, but I don't think it's likely the developer purposely designed it to work like that. Some simple possibilities: (a) perhaps the page was originally intended only to be accessible from a user hitting from a private link sent to their email address (i.e. how normal password resets work, or (b) The API in use was designed to only be accessed server-side, but it was inadvertently proxied through to a client-side call.

Again, yes, the bug is very bad. Software is complex, and humans are humans, and it's not difficult to imagine how these bugs occur.

[kbenson]

I don't think the developer designed it to work that way either, but something like this only happens when the person creating it, or the people touching it after either don't know how important this interaction flow is or don't take it seriously enough.

Whatever API this is using, there's zero reason to show any information about the request other than "we didn't die, so it should succeed". Beyond even showing it, there's zero reason for a password reset API to respond to the request with the secret at all. If it needs to return anything identifying about the request, it should be some identifier that is NOT the secret, which can be used to pull up general info about the request later if needed (time generated, whether it was used, is it expired, etc). Extra points if the access credentials to any back-end API the request page uses can't even request the secret key from a request.

A sane API makes it very hard for something like this to happen. Often that takes an inversion of thinking, so instead of making an API as useful as possible and return as much data as efficiently as possible, you make to make it as secure as possible, which means returning as little data as possible to satisfy the specific needs of the use case, and different locked down credentials for specific use cases.

[hiharryhere]

That’s why doing pen tests on the regular is necessary. We shouldn’t rely on humans getting it right every time, or strangers on the internet reporting it.