Quantifying User Password Exposure to Third-Party CDNs

Web services commonly employ Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) for performance and security. As web traffic is becoming 100% HTTPS, more and more websites allow CDNs to terminate their HTTPS connections. This practice may expose a website's user sensitive information such as a user's login password to a third-party CDN. In this paper, we measure and quantify the extent of user password exposure to third-party CDNs. We find that among Alexa top 50K websites, at least 12,451 of them use CDNs and contain user login entrances. Among those websites, 33% of them expose users' passwords to the CDNs, and a popular CDN may observe passwords from more than 40% of its customers. This result suggests that if a CDN infrastructure has a security vulnerability or an insider attack, many users' accounts will be at risk. A simple fix to this security vulnerability is for a website to encrypt a user's password inside the HTTPS request. Our measurement shows that less than 17% of the websites adopt this solution.