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OTF-005: Improper Input Sanitation: It is possible to change the username to that of another chat participant with an additional space character at the end of the name string

Low
micahflee published GHSA-68vr-8f46-vc9f Jan 18, 2022

Package

OnionShare (OnionShare)

Affected versions

>= 2.3

Patched versions

2.5

Description

Between September 26, 2021 and October 8, 2021, Radically Open Security conducted a penetration test of OnionShare 2.4, funded by the Open Technology Fund's Red Team lab. This is an issue from that penetration test.

  • Vulnerability ID: OTF-005
  • Vulnerability type: Improper Input Sanitization
  • Threat level: Low

Description:

It is possible to change the username to that of another chat participant with an additional space character at the end of the name string.

Technical description:

Assumed users in Chat:

  • Alice
  • Bob
  • Mallory
  1. Mallory renames to Alice .
  2. Mallory sends message as Alice .
  3. Alice and Bob receive a message from Mallory disguised as Alice , which is hard to distinguish from the Alice
    in the web interface.

otf-005-a
otf-005-b

Other (invisible) whitespace characters were found to be working as well.

Impact:

An adversary with access to the chat environment can use the rename feature to impersonate other participants by adding whitespace characters at the end of the username.

Recommendation:

  • Remove non-visible characters from the username

Severity

Low

CVE ID

CVE-2022-21696

Weaknesses

No CWEs