Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: Google's robot.txt handling
From: Jeffrey Walton <noloader () gmail com>
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:57:31 -0500
On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 5:53 PM, Christian Sciberras <uuf6429 () gmail com> wrote:
If you ask me, it's a stupid idea. :) I prefer to know where I am with a service; and (IMHO) I would prefer to query (occasionally) Google for my CC instead of waiting for someone to start taking funds off it. Hiding it only provides a false sense of security - it will last until someone finds the service leaking out CCs.
Agreed. How about search engine data by other crawlers that was not sanitized?
This is especially the case with robots.txt. Can someone on the list please define a "good web crawler"?
Haha! Milk up the nose.
I think the problem here is that people are plain stupid and throw in direct entries inside robots.txt, whereas they should be sending wildcard entries. Couple that with actually protecting sensitive areas, and it's a pretty good defence.
We now know you don't need a robots.txt for exclusion. Just ask Weev. Jeff
On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 10:38 PM, Jeffrey Walton <noloader () gmail com> wrote:On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 4:11 PM, Mario Vilas <mvilas () gmail com> wrote:I think we can all agree this is not a vulnerability. Still, I have yet to see an argument saying why what the OP is proposing is a bad idea. It may be a good idea to stop indexing robots.txt to mitigate the faults of lazy or incompetent admins (Google already does this for many specific search queries) and there's not much point in indexing the robots.txt file for legitimate uses anyway.I kind of agree here. The information is valuable for the reconnaissance phase of an attack, buts its not a vulnerability per se. But what is to stop the attacker from fetching it himself/herself since its at a known location for all sites? In this case, Google would be removing aggregated search results (which means the attacker would have to compile it himself/herself). Google removed other interesting searches, such as social security numbers and credit card numbers (or does not provide them to the general public). JeffOn Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 2:01 PM, Scott Ferguson <scott.ferguson.it.consulting () gmail com> wrote:If I understand the OP correctly, he is not stating that listing something in robots.txt would make it inaccessible, but rather that Google indexes the robots.txt files themselves,<snipped> Well, um, yeah - I got that. So you are what, proposing that moving an open door back a few centimetres solves the (non) problem? Take your proposal to it's logical extension and stop all search engines (especially the ones that don't respect robots.txt) from indexing robots.txt. Now what do you do about Nutch or even some perl script that anyone can whip up in 2 minutes? Security through obscurity is fine when couple with actual security - but relying on it alone is just daft. Expecting to world to change so bad habits have no consequence is dangerously naive. I suspect you're looking to hard at finding fault with Google - who are complying with the robots.txt. Read the spec. - it's about not following the listed directories, not about not listing the robots.txt. Next you'll want laws against bad weather and furniture with sharp corners. Don't put things you don't want seen to see in places that can be seen.On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Scott Ferguson < scott.ferguson.it.consulting () gmail com> wrote: /From/: Hurgel Bumpf <l0rd_lunatic () yahoo com> /Date/: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 19:25:39 +0000 (GMT) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hi list, i tried to contact google, but as they didn't answer my email, i do forward this to FD. This "security" feature is not cleary a google vulnerability, but exposes websites informations that are not really intended to be public. Conan the bavarian Your point eludes me - Google is indexing something which is publicly available. eg.:- curl http://somesite.tld/robots.txt So it seems the solution to the "question" your raise is, um, nonsensical. If you don't want something exposed on your web server *don't publish references to it*. The solution, which should be blindingly obvious, is don't create the problem in the first place. Password sensitive directories (htpasswd) - then they don't have to be excluded from search engines (because listing the inaccessible in robots.txt is redundant). You must of missed the first day of web school.
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Current thread:
- Re: Google's robot.txt handling Scott Ferguson (Dec 11)
- Re: Google's robot.txt handling Mario Vilas (Dec 11)
- Re: Google's robot.txt handling Jeffrey Walton (Dec 11)
- Re: Google's robot.txt handling Hurgel Bumpf (Dec 11)
- Re: Google's robot.txt handling Christian Sciberras (Dec 11)
- Re: Google's robot.txt handling Jeffrey Walton (Dec 11)
- Re: Google's robot.txt handling Thomas Behrend (Dec 11)
- Re: Google's robot.txt handling Jeffrey Walton (Dec 11)
- Re: Google's robot.txt handling Mario Vilas (Dec 11)