Re: IQ Handling vulnerabilities

On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 3:10 PM, Joe Hildebrand (jhildebr) <
[email protected]> wrote:

> On 2/7/14 2:46 AM, "Thijs Alkemade" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> >The property we really want from ids is that predicting the next one(s)
> >given
> >some historic ones is hard.
>
> (as individual)
>
> I agree with everything you said to this point.  However, I think we need
> to strengthen this a little: we want to ensure predicting the next one(s)
> in *any* way is hard.
>
> Luckily using the from address also mitigates this need slightly for some
> of the use cases.
>

What are the attacks possible against an entity using predictable stanza
ids, but which otherwise acts properly (ie, checks to/from on responses,
etc)?

I'm a bit confused - if an entity isn't checking the to/from of the
responses, then sure there's a slew of attacks possible. If it *also* has
predictable ids, then the attacks are easier - but they're the same
attacks. Aren't they?

I'm not saying that we shouldn't generally recommend unpredictable ids - it
seems relatively simple and causes little harm - but cryptographically
secure ones seems overkill, and I'm always nervous of imposing unneeded
drains on the entropy store of a system.

Also, I've mentioned this elsewhere, but I'll mention it here too: much of
the XMPP community seems focussed on clients exhibiting this class of bug,
and attacks against those clients. I strongly suspect that not all servers
are immune to this, and the attacks on servers are likely to be just as
fascinating.

Dave.

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