• 44 Posts
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Joined 3 年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月12日

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  • I don’t know about other homeserver implementations but synapse kinda sucks. It used to randomly eat 100% of 1 or 2 CPU cores (including the database) until I tracked it down to 3 rooms having a messed up state which caused costly SQL queries. I removed the rooms from my server (using a third party admin panel because there’s no proper admin GUI built in, the documentation just mentions curl commands to hit the admin API, with placeholders to manually replace). It has been fine since I did it, but I’m the only user on my server. And I expect other issues to come up at any time…

    It also eats a lot of storage, mostly the database. It grew very large quickly, but it’s more stable now





  • Reading the parts of the original report that are shown in the article, it gives me “AI-generated” vibes. Especially the part at the end, where they list other subreddits the user engaged with : this section feels so unnatural and irrelevant to the broader report

    Knowing how much this administration loves AI, this seems plausible to me that these reports are auto generated, either from a human flagging specific posts, or from an automatic flagging system









  • I believe Signal has already fixed it, while meta said they won’t fix this in WhatsApp.

    This side channel can be used to infer more than a rough timezone, specifically, an attacker could continuously monitor :

    • the number of devices linked to the target’s account, along with fingerprints that allow differentiation between operating systems and browsers
    • the locked or unlocked state of the target’s phone
    • whether the phone is connected via Wi-Fi or a mobile network
    • whether the WhatsApp application or browser tab is running in the foreground or background.

    In addition, an attacker could deliberately drain the target’s phone battery and consume their mobile data allowance

    I’ve tested this on myself and can confirm all of this can be done reliably



  • This is not high effort. Starting from an open source WhatsApp client library, reproducing the attacks described in the research paper is trivial. There are even a few public github repos implementing PoCs of this.

    Whether the reward should be considered high or low is ultimately subjective. What is objectively verifiable, however, is that an attacker can continuously (and silently) monitor several aspects of a target’s environment, including:

    • the number of devices linked to the target’s account, along with fingerprints that allow differentiation between operating systems and browsers
    • the locked or unlocked state of the target’s phone
    • whether the phone is connected via Wi-Fi or a mobile network
    • whether the WhatsApp application or browser tab is running in the foreground or background.

    In addition, an attacker could deliberately drain the target’s phone battery and consume their mobile data allowance.