All Your Shops Are Belong to Us: Security Weaknesses in E-commerce Platforms

Software as a Service (SaaS) e-commerce platforms for merchants allow individual business owners to set up their online stores almost instantly. Prior work has shown that the checkout flows and payment integration of some e-commerce applications are vulnerable to logic bugs with serious financial consequences, e.g., allowing “shopping for free”. Apart from checkout and payment integration, vulnerabilities in other e-commerce operations have remained largely unexplored, even though they can have far more serious consequences, e.g., enabling “store takeover”. In this work, we design and implement a security evaluation framework to uncover security vulnerabilities in e-commerce operations beyond checkout/payment integration. We use this framework to analyze 32 representative e-commerce platforms, including web services of 24 commercial SaaS platforms and 15 associated Android apps, and 8 open source platforms; these platforms host over 10 million stores as approximated through Google dorks. We uncover several new vulnerabilities with serious consequences, e.g., allowing an attacker to take over all stores under a platform, and listing illegal products at a victim’s store—in addition to “shopping for free” bugs, without exploiting the checkout/payment process. We found 12 platforms vulnerable to store takeover (affecting 41000+ stores) and 6 platforms vulnerable to shopping for free (affecting 19000+ stores, approximated via Google dorks on Oct. 8, 2022). We have responsibly disclosed the vulnerabilities to all affected parties, and requested four CVEs (three assigned, and one is pending review).