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by fc417fc802 59 days ago
Even if the intent is clear I don't think the act of reading an available field qualifies as exploiting a vulnerability. IMO you need to actually work around a technical measure intended to stop you for it to qualify as an exploit.
1 comments
NotPractical 59 days ago
Here's the technical measures that are being worked around: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/fingerprinting-protectio...

> IMO you need to actually work around a technical measure intended to stop you for it to qualify as an exploit.

Even well-known vulnerabilities like SQL injection don't qualify under this definition?

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fc417fc802 59 days ago
Sure, my wording isn't perfect. I don't have a watertight definition ready to go. To my mind the spirit of the thing is that (for example) if a site has an http endpoint that accepts arbitrary sql queries and blindly runs them then sending your own custom query doesn't qualify as an exploit any more than scraping publicly accessible pages does. Whereas if you have to cleverly craft an sql query in a way that exploits string escapes in order to work around the restrictions that the backend has in place then that's technically an exploit (although it's an incredibly minor one against a piece of software whose developer has put on a display of utter incompetence).

The point isn't my precise wording but the underlying concept that making use of freely provided information isn't exploiting anything even if both the user and the developer are unhappy about the end result. Security boundaries are not defined post hoc by regret.

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