How to go from zero to 400,000 push notifications in one day

How to go from zero to 400,000 push notifications in one day(islandofdoom.com)

16 points by MProgrammer 13 years ago | 11 comments

ajlburke 13 years ago |

Nice post-mortem of a quirky bug. I think we're only going to be getting more problems as web services can change their APIs instantly, while iOS apps have a build-test-deploy cycle measured in weeks.

Don't get me started about Facebook

AUmrysh 13 years ago | |

I think API versioning is important for this very reason. It's also important for developers to update their code to run on newer versions of the API so companies can drop support for the old API eventually.

dan1234 13 years ago |

I'm pretty surprised that neither Apple nor StackMob had an upper limit for the number of notifications your account could send or a user's device could receive within a set time.

I wonder how many users have now uninstalled your app?

stickfigure 13 years ago |

Do I understand correctly that StackMob lets your iOS client send push notifications directly to other users?

How does this API prevent spammers from hijacking your app credentials to send pushes to all your users?

MProgrammer 13 years ago | |

They're not sent "directly" -- they go through StackMob's servers. Urban Airship has a client library that can do the same thing, and it's widely used.

I can see how it's certainly possible for a spammer to do that with hackery, but there's a mechanism to revoke API keys and so forth if needed.

stickfigure 13 years ago | | |

Revoking your API key is the equivalent of taking your application offline. And there's no fix; as soon as you reissue your application (after waiting a week for Apple's approval) then the spammer has your API key again and can start sending pushes through StackMob/Urban Airship.

I send a lot of push notifications through my own servers. I made sure that spammers would have a hard time abusing it by constraining (server-side) who can send what messages to whom. Unless I'm missing something, StackMob has no defense against spam whatsoever.

If spammers aren't already abusing this, they will be soon.

mason55 13 years ago | |

Sounds like you're responsible for ensuring that your app only sends broadcasts when appropriate. If you create an app that lets end users send push notifications to an arbitrary list of users then that's on you for allowing it to happen.

stickfigure 13 years ago | | |

If the iOS application decides who to send messages to and what the content of the message should be, then anyone who downloads the app now has the ability to spam to any other user just by extracting the API key out of the binary and using the StackMob API directly.

hackmiester 13 years ago |

I wonder if there is any chance of seeing this app on Android. I know it's a small project and that seems silly, but hell, maybe I want to talk to iPhone users.

StavrosK 13 years ago |

TL;DR: It was a bug.