I’m certainly no web security expert, but shouldn’t Tea’s junior network/backend/security developers, let alone seniors, know how to secure said Firebase or S3 buckets with STARTTLS or SSL certificates? Shouldn’t a company like this have some sort of compliance department?
It’s a little more complex than that. If you want the app on the user device to be able to dump data directly into your online database, you have to give it access in some way. Encrypting the transmission doesn’t do much if every app installation contains access credentials that can be extracted or sniffed.
Obviously there are ways around this too, but it’s not just “use TLS”.
Wouldn’t some sort of proxy in between the bucket and the client app solve this problem? I feel like you could even set up an endpoint on your backend that manages the upload. In other words, why is it necessary for the client app to connect directly with the bucket?
Maybe I’m not understanding the gist of the problem
Exactly, it’s not necessary. It’s bad / lazy design. You don’t expose the DB storage directly, you expose a frontend that handles all the authentication and validation stuff before accessing the DB on the backend. That’s normal Client-Server-Database architecture.
Every time. With startups, it’s always an unsecured Firebase or S3 bucket.
I’m certainly no web security expert, but shouldn’t Tea’s junior network/backend/security developers, let alone seniors, know how to secure said Firebase or S3 buckets with STARTTLS or SSL certificates? Shouldn’t a company like this have some sort of compliance department?
It’s a little more complex than that. If you want the app on the user device to be able to dump data directly into your online database, you have to give it access in some way. Encrypting the transmission doesn’t do much if every app installation contains access credentials that can be extracted or sniffed.
Obviously there are ways around this too, but it’s not just “use TLS”.
Wouldn’t some sort of proxy in between the bucket and the client app solve this problem? I feel like you could even set up an endpoint on your backend that manages the upload. In other words, why is it necessary for the client app to connect directly with the bucket?
Maybe I’m not understanding the gist of the problem
Exactly, it’s not necessary. It’s bad / lazy design. You don’t expose the DB storage directly, you expose a frontend that handles all the authentication and validation stuff before accessing the DB on the backend. That’s normal Client-Server-Database architecture.
I am not sure, but I read somewhere that the developer(s) used vibe coding to create the app so…
A lot of people have speculated that.
According to their statement their code was written in Feb/2024 and predates “vibe coding”