January 12, 2012
Twitter does something I consider to be poor security-wise... not renaming, or removing EXIF information from, uploaded avatar images. There are a few potential security issues around this, all of which I've personally come across:
- The image might be named with the person's first and last name - potentially disclosing more information than they intended to in their Twitter profile
- Many people download their Facebook Profile picture to use on Twitter - Facebook renames uploaded files to include the Facebook user ID, allowing you to easily find their Facebook profile (as opposed to trying to search on their first and last name)
- If the original filename is unique enough you can often find other related pictures just by Goolging
- You can use something like Jeffrey's Exif viewer to extract EXIF information from the image - often telling you what type of camera/phone the user has
Sure, they're small things, but for anyone wanting to Social Engineer the target it could certainly help. The frustrating part: it would take only few lines of code for Twitter to prevent this, and it really is (in my opinion) a "best practice" they're simply not bothering to follow.