Andrew Lee

Andrew Lee is a security engineer on Okta’s Research and Exploitation (REX) team, where he works with developers to create secure solutions by employing a mix of manual and automated techniques. He is curious about the evolution of all complex systems—from the living to the artificial—and how they develop defenses against exploitation. With a focus on automated reasoning and cryptography, Andrew’s research explores methods that distinguish between the benign and the malicious.

Andrew Lee

October 10, 2018

Using hack_url_re to Auto Detect Website Spoofing Vulnerabilities

Phishing attacks often spoof websites in order to steal passwords, tricking users into entering credentials to a website that looks identical to the one they routinetly access. To avoid such trickery, account holders can trust their passwords to password managers like Okta’s SWA plugin, which are not fooled by visual similarity. However, if the code for identifying the website contains any flaws, attackers could exploit them in order to continue to steal passwords. Recognizing this threat, the...

Andrew Lee

August 14, 2018

Multi-Factor Mixup: Who Were You Again?

Summary: A weakness in the Microsoft ADFS protocol for integration with MFA products allows a second factor for one account to be used for second-factor authentication to all other accounts in an organization. After being notified about the vulnerability and independently validating it, Microsoft produced a patch to address it. See CVE-2018-8340. This vulnerability is best addressed within ADFS and it likely affects all MFA products for ADFS. Organizations running Microsoft ADFS are advised...