[tor-bugs] #5011 [Pluggable transport]: Discuss possible designs for an external program that discovers bridge addresses to tell Tor about them

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#5011: Discuss possible designs for an external program that discovers bridge
addresses to tell Tor about them
---------------------------------+------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  karsten              |          Owner:  mikeperry
     Type:  task                 |         Status:  new      
 Priority:  normal               |      Milestone:           
Component:  Pluggable transport  |        Version:           
 Keywords:  MikePerry201203      |         Parent:  #5010    
   Points:                       |   Actualpoints:           
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Comment(by mikeperry):

 Replying to [comment:11 nickm]:
 > That sounds initially plausible to me.  I wonder about the
 unauthenticated aspect of the "dumb IPC" attribute, though.  Historically,
 every security feature on control ports turned out to be necessary, and
 then some.  If an attacker can remotely inject hostile bridges, they could
 use that to deanonymize a user.

 Yeah, I was sweeping this under the "robust to arbitrary input" rug. I was
 thinking that the main risk exposure was that anything automatic could
 happen at all. That's why I tried to make sure the confirmation request
 came from Vidalia/Orbot..

 > So it's important to make sure that this kind of attack won't work.

 Yeah, you're right. For best practice, BridgeFinder should create a way
 for BridgeFinderHelper to authenticate. I was hoping not to have to solve
 that.. What's the best option? Some sort of filesystem-based cookie
 authentication? BridgeFinder's simple control port barfs a file path for
 BridgeFinderHelper to read from? What about BridgeFinderHelpers that can't
 read arbitrary file paths? (I think Chrome extensions fall into this
 category).

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5011#comment:12>
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