How I pwned half of America’s fast food chains, simultaneously.

Also checkout Eva’s blogpost of this event.

With an upbeat pling my console alerted me that my script had finished running, to be precise it was searching for exposed Firebase credentials on any of the hundreds of recent AI startups.

This was achieved through a public list of sites using the .ai TLD and parsing the site data (and any referenced .js bundles) for references to common Firebase initialisation variables.

Production: {
    apiKey: "AIza<Insert_Funny_Joke_Here>",
    authDomain: "KFC.firebaseapp.com",
    databaseURL: "https://KFC.firebaseio.com",
    projectId: "KFC",
    storageBucket: "KFC.appspot.com",
    messagingSenderId: "123456789"
}

My hunch was that in the rush to push their new shiny product, someone would take a shortcut and forget to implement proper security rules.

The hunch was right, and it was worse than I could’ve ever guessed.

Meet Chattr.ai

…The self proclaimed AI hiring system that claims to shave 88% of the time off hiring new people.

They provide their services to a massive number of fast food chains and other hourly employers around the United States, including but not limited to:

Applebees
Arbys
Chickfila
Dunkin
IHOP
KFC
Shoneys
Subway
Tacobell
Target
Wendys

The Vulnerability

If you drop the Firebase configuration from the JS bundle into Firepwn, you start out with zero permissions as you can see in the following screenshot. Firebase query returning an empty result

But if you use Firebase’s registration feature to create a new user (you cannot register on their site), you get full privileges (read/write) to the Firebase DB. Firebase query returning lots of information about the organizations signed up for chattr

The data it exposes includes and is not limited to:

Names
Phone numbers
Emails
Plaintext passwords (Only some account’s had exposed passwords)
Locations of branches
Confidential messages
Shifts

For the following:

Chattr employees
Franchisee managers
Job applicants

Timeline (DD/MM)

06/01 - Vulnerability Discovered
09/01 - Write-up completed & Emailed to them
10/01 - Vulnerability patched
11/01 - Support ticket closed, no thanks or further contact received despite explicitly requesting it

Credits

To my friends who assisted me with this pentest and responsible disclosure of such

Logykk
Eva - https://kibty.town/blog/chattr