Hey all, I'm working in the trucking industry and we often rely on loadboards to find freight. I've observed that high-paying loads get snatched up quickly because they're prioritized for companies with better ratings. However, I've come across a situation where a company seems to exploit a method, possibly using Chrome's developer tools, to view and book premium loads with an account that has a lower rating. They appear to access these loads through a higher-rated account and then book them through their lower-rated one. I'm curious if anyone can break down what's going on here. Is it due to some API misuse, a security flaw in how permissions are checked, or maybe some session token manipulation? I'd appreciate any simple explanations or insights into the methods that might allow this to happen. I'm not asking anyone to commit any violations; I just want to understand the possibilities here.
3 Answers
You've touched on the key issue—allowing users to book loads they’re not supposed to is a clear backend mistake. If users can see these loads, that’s another issue, but the real problem is the permission management isn't doing its job. That's where the developers need to focus their efforts to ensure that proper checks are in place before any bookings can happen.
Totally agree! They should prioritize backend security over just frontend appearances to ensure a more secure system.
This situation likely points to a permissions issue. The good loads might not be outright inaccessible but simply filtered out for lower-rated users. If someone can get the ID or URL for a high-rated load, they could bypass this filtering and access it from any account. This can happen when development focuses too much on frontend measures instead of solid backend security—often under time constraints. So really, the data might still be available in the API responses, just not shown to everyone by default.
Totally, every load usually has a unique identifier that's pretty long. If you can grab that ID, you might as well access the load regardless of your account rating.
I agree! The frontend often ends up doing more than it should, just trying to make it 'look' like things are secure but failing to implement real backend checks.
I would add that they likely do their filtering on the client side. This means they send all loads to the user's computer and let the browser handle what to show or hide. When the backend only does light checks, it’s risky. If a load has an ID, like any traditional booking system, all it takes is that ID to book it, which makes it easy for users to manipulate if they know what to look for.
And yeah, depending on how lax their terms of service are, it's possible that these practices might not even be against the rules unless they're directly specified.
Exactly, it might just be about shoving those IDs into the booking service from the client side. That's not that hard to figure out if they expose that data.
That's spot on! If they can manage the backend correctly, it would prevent these kinds of exploits from happening altogether.