Back in 2019 I reverse engineered the lyft bikes api to unlock them from my bed. It's one of my favorite stories, and after telling it dozens of times I finally decided to write it up in its full technical glory.
I used to love learning about security through blog posts/writeups, so I tried to include as much detail as possible. Let me know if you like this style!
Believe it or not, straight to jail! Just kidding, great writeup. I know it's not groundbreaking, but does surprise me how many products don't bother with rate limiting controls.
i actually think a quick-fix was setting a rate limit. which sadly thwarted my brute-forcing, but did not actually fix the race condition itself. though it's a very fair "kid, stop it" response until they fixed the race condition.
I see the lack of cert pinning as a sign of having a good security team. Pinning is usually implemented as "we had an external security audit and their report said we should". Security auditors and pentesters tend to add this kind of crap (alongside root detection and obfuscation) to their reports to pad them out and make their work sound more valuable to the paper-pushers. So either Lyft had their audits done by a competent provider, or their staff know enough to filter this bullshit out. Either way, props.
Pinning certs has generally been discouraged for a while afaik. It's pretty trivial to bypass, at least on Android where you can side load easy, and it's a pain in the ass to manage with a huge potential to just take down your app if you mess it up
I used Charles to help me get endpoints for controlling my automatic cat toilet. The Chinese based iOS app was horrible to use and who knows what data it collected.
After getting the endpoints, I was able to plug it directly into Home assistant.
Now that some bikes have electronic shifting, you can attack the bike itself. I wrote two blog post about how to downgrade the Shimano Di2 shifters and do a replay attack to remotely shift it. You can find them here:
> Geofence bypass: As far as I understand, there's no easy way to enforce a geofence server-side other than timing, consistency, etc. You sort of just have to trust whatever the phone tells you.
There's no fool proof method but you can make it very hard and impractical.
Both Apple and Google offer attestation mechanisms to confirm the integrity of the App and Device Environment that it's running on. This ensures that the API requests are coming from an attested device.
To mitigate the MITM attack you can use TLS Certificate pinning on sensitive API requests.
You could have the server side API provide a session specific signing token that the App uses to sign payloads attached to API calls.
1. This was not a mitm attack, it was lawful mitm inspection of a user's own traffic. Mitm attacks are prevented by TLS and the system CA store already.
2. Please don't give people bad ideas. This is how we get bikeshare apps that don't work on rooted/old/GrapheneoOS/... devices and further entrench google's position in the Android ecosystem.
If your security depends on devices faithfully reporting their location, you've already lost. Get a whiteboard, start from scratch.
There are attestation mechanisms, but huge portions of a public user-base (especially android) don't pass that check because their device is too old, or their OEM sucked, or something something mediatek SOC, or <insert esoteric detail within the attested data that fails check in opaque way>
In my experience, all forms of attestation start to become impractical at scale unless you have a fairly homogeneous, well-patched fleet. This is particularly heinous for TPMs, where I've observed TPMs coming off one STM line having invalid EK certs, but other STM TPMs of the same model are fine. Or the platform firmware stamped out onto the motherboard has a bug in how it extends PCR0 and the event log is just borked forever, and so on... Totally unworkable.
if i would have actually unlocked all bikes then yes, they would have been under my account and i could have been in deep trouble. fortunately, (I made sure) that did not happen :)
Back in 2019 I reverse engineered the lyft bikes api to unlock them from my bed. It's one of my favorite stories, and after telling it dozens of times I finally decided to write it up in its full technical glory.
I used to love learning about security through blog posts/writeups, so I tried to include as much detail as possible. Let me know if you like this style!
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