Four things auditors of applications of this kind report seeing over and over,
each of them mechanical: a header that is absent, a scheme that is plain, a
login that answers a thousand guesses, a reset form that confirms which
addresses have accounts. None needs understanding to be checked, which is why
they belong in a script rather than a page somebody re-reads before a release
and then does not.
*(precautionary)* -- none of it has bitten a project here. The checks are cheap
and the evidence is somebody else's.
**Passive by default.** A bare run sends two GETs and could not be mistaken for
anything. Rate limiting and enumeration are behind --auth, because one of them
deliberately generates a dozen failed authentications.
**It refuses any host but its configured origin.** There is no URL argument that
can point it elsewhere: the target is PREFLIGHT_ORIGIN, and a URL on the command
line must match it. status.sh makes this argument for having no --host flag;
here there is more at stake, since a mistake there reads the wrong machine and a
mistake here hammers somebody else's login form from your address. The login and
reset paths are configured too, never guessed -- a POST to an assumed /login on
the wrong app posts to whatever is actually there.
Verified: exit 2 unconfigured, for a foreign host, and for an unreachable one;
exit 0 for --dry-run; exit 1 with the finding named. Run passively against
privacyllc.dev it correctly reported a strong CSP, a framing policy and HSTS,
and found that plain http answers 200 with the full page rather than
redirecting -- which is the class of finding this exists for, on its first real
target.
closes#9
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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