Reverse Engineering US Airline's PNR System and Accessing All Reservations

Avelo assists ICE daily with deporting people from the United States:

https://bsky.app/profile/jjindc.bsky.social/search?q=avelo

The 6 hour claim is interesting, but I highly doubt Avelo (or any airline) would handle 100k requests/sec

If we consider that the real major's move about 400k-500k passengers/day, let's be really optimistic and say that they check their booking 6 times a day for the week before they fly. That's around 250 requests/sec.

Anyone know about the consumer facing tech stacks at airlines these days? Seems unlikely that they'd have databases that would auto scale 400x...

>The Avelo team was responsive, professional, and took the findings seriously throughout the disclosure process. They acknowledged the severity, worked quickly to remediate the issues, and maintained clear communication. This is a model example of how organizations should handle security disclosures.

Sounds like no bug bounty?

It's great if OP is happy with the outcome, but it's so infuriating that companies are allowed to leak everyone's data with zero accountability and rely on the kindness of security researchers to do free work to notify them.

I wish there was a law that assigned a dollar value to different types of PII leaks and fined the organization that amount with some percentage going to the whistleblower. So a security researcher could approach a vendor and say, "Hi! I discovered vulnerabilities in your system that would result in a $500k fine for you. For $400k, I'll disclose it to you privately, or you can turn me down and I'll receive $250k from your fines."

The lack of needing the last name might have allowed a hacker to brute force the whole list; but it seems that even with a last name, it could expose a lot of PII. Just pass codes along with popular last names (Smith, Jones, Nelson, etc.) and it seems like it could spit out a bunch of reservations.

> They were responsive, professional, and took the findings seriously, patching the issues promptly.

The "issue" is that they're returning the entire PNR dataset to the front-end in the first place. He doesn't detail how they fixed it, but there's no reason in the world that this entire dataset should be dumped into Javascript. I got into pretty heated arguments with folks about this at Travelocity and this shit is exactly why I was so adamant.

Do we know what GDS Avelo is using? In other GDSes, is the confirmation code always sufficient to fully identify a booking? I was under the impression that PRLs could be re-used as long as the passenger surname was different.

The space of all possible PRLs is about 2 billion, I can imagine a really big Airline moving that many passengers.

Great work, very impressive find.

> I immediately disclosed this to the Avelo team. They were responsive, professional, and took the findings seriously, patching the issues promptly.

(emphasis my own)

Sorry but I strongly disagree with this phrasing. This is a company "serving over 6 million customers since its 2021 launch" (from Google) that took four weeks to patch an embarrassing security flaw, after being handed all the details on a silver platter.

Imagine a food chain serving a million meals a year was revealed to be storing their food products in unsanitary conditions, and it took them a full month to correct this. That story would make national headlines, not to mention they could get promptly shut down by any competent health ministry.

I think this attitude mostly reveals how complacent we've become about these """incidents""": we just expect this to happen, everywhere and all the time, then we just shrug and say "they fixed it within a month, how responsible of them".

Always consider rate limiting if you deploy a public endpoint. Always require authentication to perform resource-consuming and/or privacy leaking requests. (Requiring authentication makes rate limiting more practical since even a distributed attacker would need many credentials, which they probably don't have).

Major? Avelo?

Annoying sensationalist writing, but good find!

This is about a non-rate-limited endpoint providing ticket data given a booking code only (and not last name as it's usually the case), which makes it feasible to bruteforce the entire search space.

(unfortunately, I feel like AI was overused in authoring the writeup)