MUTE flaw report
p2p news / p2pnet: Secunia is reporting a low-level, non-critical flaw in Jason Rohrer’s MUTE p2p file sharing application which, "potentially can be exploited by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions," says the site.
"This came up about a month ago," Rohrer told p2pnet. "I don’t have a grudge against the guy – I was just surprised to see such a minor issue show up on a security site."
In a media release, "This issue, though not terribly serious, is well known," says Rohrer, who wrote the script for the Patti Santangelo Fight Goliath campaign.
"The problem will be fixed in the next release by changing MUTE to ensure that it has a pool of possible hosts from a number of web caches before it randomly picks from that pool.
"This vulnerability could only be exploited if the attacker was running a MWebCaches. The attacker wouldn’t be able to ‘flood’ a legitimate web cache with attacker nodes.
"Why? Because the MWebCache software itself prevents nodes from posting themselves repeatedly. Thus, an attacker’s nodes could be listed on a legitimate web cache, but other non-attacker nodes would also be listed on that cache. If an attacker runs her own ‘fake’ MWebCache, however, then she could fill it however she chooses."
Rohrer says the vulnerability isn’t serious because MUTE has social safeguards in terms of how users learn about new MWebCaches. "The primary way that they learn about these caches is through the MUTE website itself, where the latest MWebCaches are posted," he says.
"Yes, it would be easy for an attacker to set up a fake MWebCache, but it would be somewhat harder for that attacker to get that cache accepted by the MUTE user community."
But, "Somewhat harder" isn’t bullet-proof, "and that’s why the issue will be dealt with in the next release," he adds.
The secunia report says a, "design weakness in the MUTE client causes it to select hosts to connect to based on 10 random hosts that are retrieved from a single mWebCache. This can potentially be exploited to cause MUTE to connect to malicious hosts if the mWebCache has been populated with addresses of malicious hosts. Successful exploitation discloses the identity of the MUTE client."
Also See:
non-critical flaw – MUTE P2P File Sharing Host Selection Weakness, February 23, 2006
