ChaosDB Explained: Azure's Cosmos DB Vulnerability Walkthrough

When we designed the security model for Google Cloud Build (I do not work there anymore), we decided that containers were not valid security barriers. So, all partitioning was done on the VM and network (configured outside the VM) level.<p>It wasn&#x27;t hard to convince anyone that this was the right way to handle things.

That is completely insane. Getting root on one container = complete access to the entire system with administrator level access? What kind of security operation are they running there exactly? Local root exploits aren&#x27;t exactly unheard of, so you&#x27;d think the infrastructure would be designed to tolerate that sort of thing, not simply hand out private keys to management APIs to all and sundry.

I had several absolutely awful experiences with CosmosDB even before this breach. Its design and engineering are the worst I&#x27;ve encountered on Azure or anywhere else that I remember.<p>This vulnerability, and especially its handling by Microsoft, were the final nail in the coffin for us and we&#x27;ve put in the effort to migrate away.

<p><pre><code> &gt; August 17 2021 - MSRC awarded $40,000 bounty for the report. </code></pre> I don&#x27;t know much about the bug bounty industry, is this the typical payout from what it seems to be a pretty severe vulnerability?

The funny thing is the founder of Wiz is formerly the head of Microsoft Israel, and many many ex-Microsoft are in Wiz. I wonder if the knowledge about Microsoft internals helped them finding this vulnerability.

There’s facinating number of places where, if implemented correctly, this attack could have been prevented.<p>Given that much of attack is related to rhings not exclusive it CosmosDB, firewall, internal service and certificate, it’s likely that other services may be at risk as well.<p>Generally, because so many flaws are involved, this cannot be easy to fix.

Wow.

You know some ms product manager thought they were &quot;winning&quot; when they included Jupyter notebook.