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
- Mallory renames to
Alice
. - Mallory sends message as
Alice
. - Alice and Bob receive a message from Mallory disguised as
Alice
, which is hard to distinguish from theAlice
in the web interface.
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