Update(12/12/2023): The Google security team reached out to say that they released an option to disable email enumeration on September 15th 2023 - more information here. We recommend enabling this option if you are using Google Identity Platform.

Introduction

Firebase Authentication and its enterprise version, Google Identity Platform, are very popular solutions for adding identity to an application.

During the course of a migration for a customer, we identified an issue in both platforms that can lead to the enumeration of users registered on an application.

We contacted Google on September 7th 2023 through their vulnerability disclosure program, and we received an answer on October 31st from their Trust and Safety team telling us that the issue won’t be fixed, as it is behavior outlined in their privacy policy. In particular, they stated that if an attacker has knowledge of the email address of a user, the intended behavior is for the attacker to be able to see information about that user.

We disagree with Google’s approach, as this kind of issue reduces user privacy and can lead to several downstream attacks. Further, several CVEs have been assigned to issues like this, and OWASP has a specific test for it in their Web Security Testing Guide, WSTG-IDNT-04.

The issue is under embargo but can be found here.

The details

Firebase Auth and Google Identity Platform have an API endpoint that allows you to check whether a user is registered or not.

The issue stems from the fact that you can use the API to enumerate accounts on a tenant. The API requires an API key to be used but, in practice, the API key is a misnomer for an identifier and it is not meant to be a secret. The API can be invoked directly from the frontend so anybody can read it from the website and reuse it. Furthermore, Google does not enforce CORS, and the documentation does not clearly describe how the endpoint is supposed to be used, so we believe the behavior to be intentional.

Reproducing this is straightforward:

1. Visit a website that uses Firebase Authentication or Google Identity Platform
2. Find an invokation of accounts:createAuthUri or any other Identity Platform API that requires an API Key
3. Invoke the API, as shown below

curl 'https://identitytoolkit.googleapis.com/v1/accounts:createAuthUri?key=<API_KEY>' --compressed -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -H 'Origin: https://<DOMAIN>' -H 'Pragma: no-cache' -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' --data-raw '{"continueUri":"<DOMAIN>","identifier":"<EMAIL>"}'
{
  "kind": "identitytoolkit#CreateAuthUriResponse",
  "allProviders": [
    "password"
  ],
  "registered": true,
  "sessionId": "8fyGaPacaiHJPVVwPu32Alyxs-k",
  "signinMethods": [
    "password"
  ]
}

Severity

From our brief investigation it is not possible to find any other information about the user beyond what we show in the example above. Ultimately, whether this issue warrants attention depends on several factors, including:

1. What jurisdiction your users fall into and which data protection laws apply
2. The kind of application and how sensitive is the knowledge that a given user exists on it (for example, healthcare applications may deem this sensitive)

Protecting against the issue

As discussed, Google will not fix this behavior, as it is intended according to their Privacy Policy. If you would like to avoid this issue the only recommendation at this time is to avoid using API keys in any frontend calls to Firebase/Google Identity Platform.

Conclusion

If you are interested in migrating from Firebase Authentication/Google Identity Platform to SlashID, you can get a free account here or reach out to us!