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From: David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
To: Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>,
	Peter Wang <novalazy@gmail.com>,
	notmuch mailing list <notmuch@notmuchmail.org>
Subject: Re: a DoS vulnerability associated with conflated Message-IDs?
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2022 09:41:41 -0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <874jyy7oxm.fsf@tethera.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87tw1nugi6.fsf@fifthhorseman.net>

Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> writes:

> On Fri 2017-08-04 16:42:54 -0400, David Bremner wrote:
>> Peter Wang <novalazy@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:37:09 -0500, Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> wrote:
>>>> notmuch currently treats all messages with the same Message-ID as
>>>> the same message.  I think this could be a vulnerability :(
>>>> 
>>>> If two messages have the same Message-ID, is there a guarantee of which
>>>> of these messages will be produced during a notmuch show?
>>>> 
>>>> Either way, it seems to create a potential DoS attack on notmuch users.
>>>
>>> Yesterday I was expecting a confirmation message which, seemingly, never
>>> came.  It turns out my maildir already contained a message from the
>>> same system.  From three years ago.  With the same Message-ID.
>>>
>>> Malice has nothing on incompetence.
>>>
>>> Could we distinguish messages with identical Message-IDs based on
>>> some header fields, e.g. Date, From?
>>
>> I wouldn't say this problem is fixed, but we are making some
>> progress. In master all copies of the file are now indexed. It still
>> needs various UI work before we can consider the problem really fixed,
>> but it is now technically possible to detect such an attack (since the
>> "good terms" are also indexed).
>
> otoh, we now enable some additional (perhaps weirder) attacks, like:
>
>  * i can make someone else's mail show up in your mailbox with a search
>    term of my choosing by sending you a new mail co-opting their
>    message-id.
>
> we definitely need some UI for dealing with this, and perhaps some
> explicit de-duping logic or maintenance scripts would be useful too.
>
>    --dkg

There is now a simple UI for dealing with duplicate messages in the
emacs UI (as of commit 1ef7c75111b84ea19af3186ddc12f2ba434c93de, which
should be part of 0.37). 

      reply	other threads:[~2022-07-30 12:41 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 9+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2012-03-08 16:37 a DoS vulnerability associated with conflated Message-IDs? Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2012-03-08 17:04 ` James Vasile
2012-03-08 17:16   ` Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2012-03-08 17:38     ` Jeremy Nickurak
2012-03-10 17:38       ` Tom Prince
2012-10-29 11:15 ` Peter Wang
2017-08-04 20:42   ` David Bremner
2017-08-04 22:15     ` Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2022-07-30 12:41       ` David Bremner [this message]

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