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blueprint-freespeech / ricochet-refresh

Anonymous peer-to-peer instant messaging
https://www.ricochetrefresh.net
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Impersonation of server #179

Closed odiferousmint closed 1 year ago

odiferousmint commented 1 year ago

As per https://github.com/blueprint-freespeech/ricochet-refresh/blob/main/doc/protocol.md, apparently it is possible to impersonate the server. How? What does it mean in practice? What is exactly meant by "server"?

morganava commented 1 year ago

So these docs are very out of date though the general themes are probably still on point. There may have been some problem with v2 onion services which made it possible.

By server we mean a Ricochet-Refresh user's onion service. The way Ricochet-inspired chat programs (eg Ricochet-Refresh, Quiet, cwtch, etc) work is that every client runs an onion service for their contacts to connect to. On launch, Ricochet-Refresh iterates over all of its contacts and attemtps to make a connection to their onion services, and perioically tries again on failure. The same goes for all of your contacts, each attempting to reach your onion service when they launch. A contact appears online when one of these connections has succeeded.

It is not known to be possible to impersonate an onion service/server without the associated ed25519 private key. So, so long as you don't leak your your ricochet-refresh config directory then it should not be possible to a malicious party to impersonate you (ie be the endpoint/server for your contacts to connect to). That said we do have https://github.com/blueprint-freespeech/ricochet-refresh/issues/71 open for actually storing this private key in an encrypted format to fix this local adversary/malware problem.

odiferousmint commented 1 year ago

On launch, Ricochet-Refresh iterates over all of its contacts and attemtps to make a connection to their onion services, and perioically tries again on failure. The same goes for all of your contacts, each attempting to reach your onion service when they launch. A contact appears online when one of these connections has succeeded.

Hey. Thank you for the answer. So I suppose with v3 onion services it is not an issue.

As for what you described with regarding to connection establishment: this is one of my problems (there is already an issue created for it). I do not want anyone to be able to tell if I am online (in the sense that I am running Ricochet). Here is the created issue: https://github.com/blueprint-freespeech/ricochet-refresh/issues/73