Well at the bottom of the article, they mention that Microsoft first closed the issue as invalid, and on the second attempt they closed it as "cannot be reproduced" (after fixing it).
I've reported a trivial way to infer details about passwords in Windows. (Ctrl-arrow in password fields in Windows 8 jumped by character group even when hidden so if a prefilled password was 123 abc.de it would stop after 3, after space (I think), after c, after dot and finally after e.)
All I got was an email: that is interesting bye bye. But it was fixed in the next patch or the next after I think.
So I didn't care to report the two bigger problems I found with Azure Information Protection [1][2] I thought about reporting them but decided against it.
And I will continue to tell people that I don't care to do free work for MS when they won't even give me a t-shirt, a mug or even acknowledge it.
Maybe if one is a security researcher it can be worth it but if you just find something interesting you'll probably be better rewarded by reddit or HN, yes, the upvotes are worthless but less so than a dismissive email.
[1] one in the downloadable AIP tooling where you can easily smuggle clear text information with rock solid plausible deniability - I found it by accident after having implemented a part of a pipeline in the most obvious way I could think of.
[2]: the second had to do with how one can configure SharePoint to automatically protect files with AIP on download, the only problem being if you logged in using another login sequence (sorry for the lack of details, this was before the pandemic and it was just a small part of what I was working on at the time) SharePoint would conveniently forget all about it despite all efforts by me, the security admin at the company and the expert that Microsoft sent to fix it.
Ha ... ha ... ha ... ha ... did they give you the run around for several months until you dropped the issue? It's actually pretty astounding that they don't get sued for this practice. If a company is paying for support and are given illiterate noobs then that is breach of contract I would think. I would never recommend entering a contract with MSFT, they produce trash products they can't support and are more invested in their Legal team than actual product.
I thought the same when a friend of mine reported something to Apple. I would guess it's SOP at this point across big tech, unless something is too big to ignore.
You might have no idea how expensive providing great support to customers is when you're an vendor like Apple or a Microsoft. It's like backports, which are even more unbelievably expensive still, and those are gone industry-wide for that reason.
Think of the cost of opportunity in having smart, capable, experienced staff doing support or backports instead of actual dev work. (Especially backports, which when they were done frequently they were done precisely because customers are risk-averse, so a great deal more review and testing (with a much larger test matrix) was required for backports, with attendant huge increase in cost.) That cost is enormous. But of course they do need to provide some support, and at some point some really good support for the really serious bugs, and the vendor will in time do it, but first the customer demand and pressure has to build.
I can't speak to Apple, but wrt Microsoft, you're not appreciating just how bad support is (or even the documentation is) and you're not appreciating how much people pay for support on top of the product.
I feel like I know more about M365 than anyone I talk to at MS. That's bad.
Reminds me of an issue I reported years ago to the super-special-premier support my company pays for. I never got to somebody who actually understood the issue but there were several managers who constantly tried to have meetings and close the ticket.
The intention of the password entry dots isn’t to prevent folks with unrestricted physical access to the machine from exfiltrating information, it’s to stop it from appearing in screenshares and casual “over the shoulder” observations.
Honestly I’m surprised they even acknowledged that as a bug, given there are many ways to get a whole lot more info than what you demonstrated, for instance the builtin “eye” button that is purpose built to reveal the full password to anyone with physical access to the machine wishing to see it.
Suppose user U has read access to Subscription S, but doesn't have access to keyvault K.
If user U can gain access to keyvault K via this exploit, it is scary.
[Vendors/Contingent staff will often be granted read-level access to a subscription under the assumption that they won't have access to secrets, for example.]
(I'm open to the possibility that I'm misunderstanding the exploit)
My reading on this is that the Reader must have read access to the API Connection in order to drive the exploit [against a secure resource they lack appropriate access to]. But a user can have Reader rights on the Subscription which does cascade down to all objects, including API Connections.
But also the API connection seems to have secret reader permissions as per screenshot in the article… Giving secret reader permission to another resource seems to be the weak link.
The API Connection in a Logic App contains a secret in order to read/write (depending on permission) a resource. Could be a Key Vault secret, Azure App Service, Exchange Online mailbox, SharePoint Online site..., etc.
The secret typically is a user account (OAuth token), but it could also be an App Id/Secret.
But somebody gave the API Connection permissions to read the KV secrets from, Exchange Mailbox, SharePoint folder etc… And anybody who has access to the API Connection now has access to the KV, SharePoint folder, etc… I do not think this is a problem with Azure, this is just how permissions work…
The API Connection in the example has permissions to read the secrets from the KeyVault -as per screenshot.
It seems to me the KeyVault secret leak originated when KeyVault K owners gave secret reader permissions to the API Connection. (And I will note that granting permissions in Azure requires Owner role-which way more privileged than the Reader role mentioned in this article.)
[edit - article used Reader role, not Contributor role]
So from that I can imply there was no payment.