From: Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>
To: notmuch mailing list <notmuch@notmuchmail.org>
Subject: a DoS vulnerability associated with conflated Message-IDs?
Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:37:09 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87k42vrqve.fsf@pip.fifthhorseman.net> (raw)
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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.
-------
The attack:
Let's say there is a public mailing list that Mallory knows
bob@example.org is subscribed to. alice@example.net sends a message to
the public mailing list detailing some problem that Bob probably needs
to deal with.
Mallory can just craft a content-free e-mail (or a dozen?) with the same
Message-ID as Alice's message, and send it to bob@example.org.
If Bob uses notmuch, he is much more likely to read one of Mallory's
bogus e-mails than to read Alice's original message.
Mallory's e-mail could also be crafted to look like spam, in the hopes
that Bob's spamfiltering scripts would mark the original message's
Message-ID as spam.
--------
I don't know how to fix this, and i'd be happy to hear if someone thinks
my analysis above is flawed and this isn't really a problem.
Any ideas on how to approach this?
--dkg
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next reply other threads:[~2012-03-08 16:37 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 9+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2012-03-08 16:37 Daniel Kahn Gillmor [this message]
2012-03-08 17:04 ` a DoS vulnerability associated with conflated Message-IDs? 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
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