I Found a $90k Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Google(simonkoeck.com)
232 points by soeckly 2 days ago | 116 comments
tl;dr: A researcher found that Google's developer docs sites (developers.google.com, firebase.google.com, etc.) stored a pickle-serialized OAuth2 flow object inside a Flask session cookie, exposing the OAuth client_secret in plaintext — and that same secret was reused as Flask's SECRET_KEY for signing the cookie. This allowed forging a session containing an arbitrary pickle payload, which the callback would pass to `pickle.loads`, yielding unauthenticated RCE (demonstrated via `time.sleep`). Google paid $90,000 ($75k S0 RCE base + 20% report-quality bonus).
HN Discussion:
  • ↓The write-up is obviously AI-generated and the author shouldn't take credit for Claude's work
  • ↑Disbelief that such basic security flaws (pickle use, key reuse) passed Google's review process
  • ↑Appreciation that Google pays substantial bounties for serious vulnerabilities
  • •Pushback on anti-LLM criticism, defending human agency when using AI tools
  • •Request for practical advice on how to find vulnerabilities like this