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From: ksmith at chartwelltechnology.com (Kenton Smith)
Subject: TinyURL

I would say if your passing sensitive information you shouldn't use this
service anyway. Even if they randomized it, there's nothing stopping
someone from just randomly entering URL's. I'd stumble upon your
sensitive information eventually. It's fine for passing news stories and
Ebay links, but I wouldn't use it for much else.

Kenton

On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 04:19, Joel R. Helgeson wrote:
> This is an information leak rather than a real vulnerability. I thought it
> might be of interest to others...
> 
> www.tinyurl.com is a website that will convert a long url to a short one. If
> you want to email a link to say, driving directions on mapquest, the url is
> rather long and will get broken up. Tinyurl will store that long link, and
> give you a short one that looks like: http://tinyurl.com/abcd
> 
> It appears that the last four letters are incremented one letter at a time,
> so my URL may be aaaa, then aaab, and so forth.
> If people are using the tiny URL service to pass along URL's to sensitive
> information, it is easy to guess these URL's.
> 
> I recently sent an email to someone with a tinyurl, and decided to change
> one character in the url and came across a link to a kiddie porn site...
> http://tinyurl.com/stab
> 
> Its a coincidence that stab is a word, but its just a few characters off
> from my URL, staa & stac are also valid URL's.
> 
> The TinyURL service should use a randomly created string, rather than one
> that is incremented by one character.  Regardless, users of this service
> could have the information they intend to share with others viewed by anyone
> that types in the string.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Joel R. Helgeson
> Director of Networking & Security Services
> SymetriQ Corporation
> 
> "Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll
> be warm for the rest of his life."
> 
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