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by micahflee 4409 days ago
I have doubts that a timing attack would even be exploitable here since it's a hidden service, but I just made the string comparison constant-time to be safe: https://github.com/micahflee/onionshare/issues/3

Keep in mind that the username/password are just hex-encoded 128 bits from /dev/urandom, so they're not guessable at all without some sort of leakage attack, like a timing attack. And if anyone attempts to do a timing attack the person hosting the file will see all the requests scrolling down their terminal in real-time and can always hit ctrl-c.

There's also the bit about knowing the hidden service .onion to attack in the first place, which wouldn't be trivial to discover, especially since I envision these to mostly be very short-lived.

But all that said, this is great feedback. Keep it coming and feel free to open security issues on github.

1 comments

What is the semantic difference between username and password? If they're both randomly generated for a particular resource, why not combine them into one access key field?