In most cases, trust boundaries are violated when a secret is exposed in a source code repository or an uncontrolled deployment environment.
Unintended people who don’t need to know the secret might get access to it. They might then be able to use it to gain unwanted access to associated
services or resources.
The trust issue can be more or less severe depending on the people’s role and entitlement.
What is the potential impact?
LaunchDarkly API access tokens are used to authenticate with the LaunchDarkly REST API. It provides full access to all resources in the account,
including projects, environments, feature flags, and user data.
Below are some real-world scenarios that illustrate some impacts of an attacker exploiting the secret.
Financial loss
Financial losses can occur when a secret is used to access a paid third-party-provided service and is disclosed as part of the source code of
client applications. Having the secret, each user of the application will be able to use it without limit to use the third party service to their own
need, including in a way that was not expected.
This additional use of the secret will lead to added costs with the service provider.
Moreover, when rate or volume limiting is set up on the provider side, this additional use can prevent the regular operation of the affected
application. This might result in a partial denial of service for all the application’s users.
Compromise of sensitive source code
The affected service is used to store private packages and repositories. If a token is leaked, it can be used by unauthorized individuals to gain
access to your sensitive code, proprietary libraries, and other confidential resources. This can lead to intellectual property theft, unauthorized
modifications, or even sabotage of your software.
If these private packages contain other secrets, it might even lead to further breaches in the organization’s services.
Infrastructure takeover
By obtaining a leaked secret, an attacker can gain control over your organization’s {service_name} infrastructure. They can modify DNS settings,
redirect traffic, or launch malicious instances that can be used for various nefarious activities, including launching DDoS attacks, hosting phishing
websites, or distributing malware. Malicious instances may also be used for resource-intensive tasks such as cryptocurrency mining.
This can result in legal liability, but also increased costs, degraded performance, and potential service disruptions.
Furthermore, corporate {service_name} infrastructures are often connected to other services and to the internal networks of the organization.
Because of this, cloud infrastructure is often used by attackers as a gateway to other assets. Attackers can leverage this gateway to gain access to
more services, to compromise more business-critical data and to cause more damage to the overall infrastructure.
