Is Zoom's Server Security Just as Vulnerable as the Client Side?
My last several blog posts have been about Zoom security. I concluded that
the architectural problems with Zoom are not serious for most people. Most conversations at most universities are quite safe if carried by Zoom. A small subset might not be safe, though, and if you’re a defense contractor or a government agency you might want to think twice, but that doesn’t apply to most of us.
But I’ve been thinking more about this caveat.
Still, it’s the shortcuts that worry me the most. Those aren’t just problems that they can fix, they make me fear for the attitudes of the development team towards security. I’m not convinced that they get it—and that’s bad. Fixing that is going to require a CISO office with real power, as well as enough education to make sure that the CISO doesn’t have to exercise that power very often.especially in light of the investigation that Mudge reported. In a nutshell, the Zoom programmers made elementary security errors when coding, and did not use protective measures that compiler toolchains make available.
It’s not a great stretch to assume that similar flaws afflict their server implementations. While Mudge noted that Zoom’s Windows and Mac clients are (possibly accidentally) somewhat safer than the Linux client, I suspect that their servers run on Linux. Were they written with similar lack of attention to security? Were the protective measures similarly ignored? I have no access to their server software, but it’s the way to bet, and that’s worrisome: if I’m right, Zoom’s servers are very vulnerable. This provides an easy denial of service attack, and an easy mechanism for an attacker to go after Zoom clients that connect via the server.
My bottom line for most people doesn’t change: it’s still safe enough for most people, though that could change if someone decided to use Zoom to inject ransomware or cryptocurrency miners to many of the planet’s end systems. But the risks are definitely higher.
Zoom has formed a CISO council to advise them on security. These people are almost certainly not the folks who will carry out the detailed code and process audits. But I hope they’ll strongly recommend an urgent look at the server side.
Here is my set of blog posts on Zoom and Zoom security.
