4 ms·
Any attacker only gets a single guess
by meejah 9y ago
Any attacker only gets a single guess
- 0x0 9y agoWhat if there are 65535 active send requests? Perhaps of which 65534 are opened by an attacker?
- tbodt 9y agoupvote, upvote, upvote, upvote, upvote
- meejah 9y agoThe attacker still just gets 1 guess per wormhole / send request. Each send-request / wormhole is its own separate thing.
- 0x0 9y agoI'm still unclear on a couple of things. How do you even know which send request the attacker attempted to attack if only the codeword identifies the send request, and the codeword was wrong? Also, what stops an attacker from trying again - alternatively, what stops an attacker from doing a denial-of-service by purposefully guessing the wrong codeword?
- meejah 9y agoThe codes have a small number in front; these are the requests. So if the server did allow 65k requests, each one would be a different number. You can guess once per request. Yes, an attacker can denial-of-service by guessing once on all the (possible) requests. There is some work towards stopping this sort of behavior (see e.g. https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole/issues/126 https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole/issues/126)
- 0x0 9y agoThanks for the explanation!
- benzinschleuder 9y agoProbably all "slots" would be "occupied" and everybody gets the attacker's sent file, iiuc.
- 0x0 9y agoOr the attacker only needs to monitor the last free slot to see what shows up?
- benzinschleuder 9y agoSeems to work both ways. Receive random file from unknown people or send chosen file to unknown people? EDIT: was just explained in other comment by meejah, thanks! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14649727#14650551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14649727#14650551)