Tag Archives: Deutsche Bahn

A case study in bad design. Todays subject: the Deutsche Bahn

Welcome to the first installment of the new series “a case study in bad design“, which will probably be an ongoing series unless something very surprising happens (namely, people stopping to write horrible code).

Todays subject is the homepage of the german railways corporation, the Deutsche Bahn. (And just setting this link revealed another faux pas, namely that their SSL certificate is only valid for www.bahn.de, not for bahn.de without the leading www).

Everything began with my mother (which is, in a way, not surprising at all, but in that case I am not talking about my birth). She regularily takes the train to Bremen, and had set up a profile for her usual passenger settings (economy or first class, which kind of seat, that sort of thing) in her bahn.de-Account. She noticed her profile repeatedly disappearing, which, at some point, made her so angry she wrote a mail to the people responsible for the website.

They responded with some seemingly senseless information about her browser not allowing cookies. But since no sensible person would store those presets in a cookie if you have a perfectly good user account to store it in, so that was obviously bullshit, right?

Right?

(Checks title of blog post) ah, damn.

A quick check turned up that the travel profile was indeed stored in a cookie. Which would have been bad enough as it was, considering that this profile…

  1. …would be nice to have on more than once PC without setting it up seperately
  2. …is user specific and, subsequently, has no business being in a cookie instead of a database in the first place
  3. …is something that does not change all too often, which makes putting it into a cookie even more stupid than it already is

Well, we now know that this information is stored in a cookie. Then again, this does not explain the random disappearence of it. That is, until you check the cookie information.

Yes, the cookie is valid for a whooping 10 days! This means that every time you don’t visit bahn.de for 10 or more days, you will loose all your preset profiles. Who exactly thought that this was a good idea? Because that person was wrong. As an added bonus, the cookie is not deleted if you log out, so if you, for some reason, create a profile on a public computer, you are leaking your travelling preferences (that’s probably not a big deal, but completely unnecessary).

But, while we’re at it, let’s play around with that cookie. Maybe we can find some Cross-Site scripting (considering all the places I have already found it, it would not surprise me to find it here). Quickly add some quotation marks, just to see what happens, aaaaand…

Obviously.

A quick trip to the source code (a mere 3000 lines of horribly indented HTML and Javascript) reveals a bunch of JavaScript imports. A glance at the *.min.js-files, followed by a curse, followed by the awesomeness that is http://jsbeautifier.org/, revealed somewhat readable Javascript code, containing gems like “b && (a = b)” (a shorthand for “if (b) a = b;”, as it seems) and wonderful “for”-statements like the following:
for (var f = c, c = d, e = void 0, e = void 0, g = [], f = f.substring(4); 0 < f.length && 0 != f.indexOf("]#");)
Appearently, separating statements in a conditional with commata makes them evaluate one after another, and the last statements result is used to check if the conditions of the conditional are fulfilled. I especially love the double assignment of e = void 0.

I will not torture you (or me) with the whole >12 000 lines of Code, but rest assured that it does not get better. In the end, I gave up on finding the cause for the lifelock that occured after my modifications to the cookie, seeing as I am not likely to be paid for this crap and my pain resistance is not high enough for this single-letter variable bullshit. I’ll notify them about it anyway, although I am not sure what (if anything) will come of it.