Oh boy, this one was a doozy…

Was working at a very big company named after a rainforest on smart home products with integrations for a certain home assistant…

New feature was being built that integrates the aforementioned home assistant with customer’s printers so they can ask the assistant to print stuff for them.

The initial design lands from our partner team with a Java backend service fairly nicely integrated with some CUPS libraries for generating the final document to be sent to the customer’s printer. All good.

They are about to launch when… uh oh… the legal team notices an AGPL licensed package in one of the CUPS library’s dependencies that was absolutely required for the document format needed by the project and the launch is cancelled.

So the team goes off in a panic looking for alternatives to this library and can’t find any replacements. After a month or two they come back with their solution…

Instead of converting the document directly in the backend service with the linked CUPS library (as AGPL is a “forbidden license” at this company) the backend uploads the initial document to an S3 bucket, then builds a CUPS document conversion bash shell script using some random Java library, the shell script is then sent (raw) to a random blank AWS host that comes prepackaged with CUPS binaries installed (these hosts were not automated with CI/CD / auto updates as was usually mandated by company practice because updating them might remove the CUPS binaries, so they required a ton of manual maintenance over the service’s lifetime…), the bash shell script is then executed on that “clean” host, downloading the document from S3, converting it via the CUPS command line binary, then reuploading it to another S3 bucket where the Java backend picks it up and continues the process of working the document through the whole backend pipeline of various services until it got to the customer’s printer.

This seemed to satisfy the legal team at the very least, and I have no doubt is probably still in production today…

The kicker though? After all those months of dev work from a whole team (likely all on 6 figure salaries), and all the time spent by various engineers including myself on maintenance and upkeep on that solution after it was transferred to us?

An alternative, completely unrestricted corporate license was available for the package in question for about $100 per year so long as you negotiated it with the maintainers.

But that was a completely unacceptable and avoidable cost according to upper management…

A program that HR had built so that all employees could they their payment receipts online

The username was the companies’ email address, the password was a government personal id code that you can lookup online, a don’t change, and you can’t update the password to something else.

So I told the director of HR this was a bad idea. She told me I was overreacting until I showed her her own receipt, then she finally understood that this is a really fucking bad idea.

Okay, so now she out me in charge of debugging that program.

So I setup a meeting with the director of the company they hired, he came by with the developer: a 21 yo girl who I think hadn’t finished college yet. Great start! Apparently it was her idea to do the authentication like that so that explains a few things.

So we dive in to the code.

First of all, the “passwords” were stored in blank, no hashing, no encryption, nothing. That wasn’t the worst.

For the authentication she made a single query to check if the user email existed. Of that was true, then step two was a second query to see if the password existed. If that were true, the email had been authenticated.

So let’s say, hypothetically, that they had actual passwords that people could change… I could still login with the email from anyone, and then use MY OWN password to authenticate.

This just blew my mind so hard that I don’t think I ever fully recovered, I still need treatment. The stupidity hurts

This one is funny because it 100% still exists somewhere, but I haven’t had the chance to verify it again.

Okay so basically its a data recorder box (ex: brainbox) that connects to a bunch of industrial sensors and sends the data over the network with your preferred method.

Builtin firmware gives you an HTTP webui to login and configure the device, with a user # and password.

I think the user itself had a builtin default admin which was #0, which everyone uses since there wasn’t really much use for other users.

Anyway, I was looking at the small JS code for the webui and noticed it had an MD5 hashing code that was very detailed with comments. It carefully laid out each operation, and explained each step to generate a hash, and then even why hashes should be used for passwords.

Here’s the kicker: It was all client side JS, so the login page would take your password, hash it, and then send the hash over plaintext HTTP POST to the server, where it would be authenticated.

Meaning you could just mitm the connection to grab the hash, and then login with the hash.

I sat there for like 10 minutes looking at the request over and over again. Like someone was smart enough to think “hey let’s use password hashing to keep this secure” and then proceeded to use it in the compleltly wrong way. And not even part of like a challenge/handshake where the server gives you a token to hash with. Just straight up MD5(password).

It was so funny because there were like a hundred of these on a network, so getting a valid hash was laughably easy.

I never got to check if this was fixed in a newer firmware version.

The architect sending a pointer over an API, in hexadecimal string format. char *c = “71E4F33B” just cast it on the right structure bro.

Just to add, we only did C/C++, on windows mfc, in a monolithic software.

I spent quite some time assuring myself that I was not the insane person before bringing it up with him.

I got forcefully moved onto another team at work. They use Observables to replace signals, change detection, local storage, and even function calls. Every single component is a tangled mess of Observables and rxjs. Our hotlist has over 300 bugs, and the app is like 6 months old.

I’ve been looking for a new team

There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.

The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.

Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.

Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.

So, this is completely off topic, but some of the comments here reminded me of it:

An elderly family friend was spending a lot of her time using Photoshop to make whimsy collages and stuff to give as gifts to friends and family.
I discovered that when she wanted to add text to an image, she would type it out in Microsoft Word, print it, scan the printed page, then overlay the resulting image over the background with a 50% opacity.
I showed her the type tool in Photoshop and it blew her mind.

I don’t have any specific examples, but the standard of code is really bad in science. I don’t mean this in an overly judgemental way — I am not surprised that scientists who have minimal code specific education end up with the kind of “eh, close enough” stuff that you see in personal projects. It is unfortunate how it leads to code being even less intelligible on average, which makes collaboration harder, even if the code is released open source.

I see a lot of teams basically reinventing the wheel. For example, 3D protein structures in the Protein Database (pdb) don’t have hydrogens on them. This is partly because that’ll depend a heckton on the pH of the environment that the protein is. Aspartic acid, for example, is an amino acid where its variable side chain (different for each amino acid) is CH2COOH in acidic conditions, but CH2COO- in basic conditions. Because it’s so relative to both the protein and the protein’s environment, you tend to get research groups just bashing together some simple code to add hydrogens back on depending on what they’re studying. This can lead to silly mistakes and shabby code in general though.

I can’t be too mad about it though. After all, wanting to learn how to be better at this stuff and to understand what was best practice caused me to go out and learn this stuff properly (or attempt to). Amongst programmers, I’m still more biochemist than programmer, but amongst my fellow scientists, I’m more programmer than biochemist. It’s a weird, liminal existence, but I sort of dig it.