Threat Analysis: Remote Login Propagation

See also blog: geballte sicherheit for getting an idea about the analysis.

Technical Background

Control Flow

Data transferred

# NodeInfoWellKnown
{"links":[
  {"href":"https://federated-repo.prod.meissa.de/api/v1/nodeinfo",
  "rel":"http://nodeinfo.diaspora.software/ns/schema/2.1"}]}

# NodeInfo
{"version":"2.1",
 "software":{"name":"gitea",
 ...}}

# LikeActivity
{"id": "https://repo.prod.meissa.de/api/v1/activitypub/user-id/1/outbox/12345",
  "type": "Like",
  "actor": "https://repo.prod.meissa.de/api/v1/activitypub/user-id/1",
  "object": "https://codeberg.org/api/v1/activitypub/repository-id/12"
  "startTime": "2014-12-31T23:00:00-08:00"
}

# Person
{"id":"https://federated-repo.prod.meissa.de/api/v1/activitypub/user-id/10",
 "type":"Person",
 "preferredUsername":"stargoose9",
 "name": "goose going to star the repo",
 "publicKey":{"id":"https://federated-repo.prod.meissa.de/api/v1/activitypub/user-id/10#main-key",
    "owner":"https://federated-repo.prod.meissa.de/api/v1/activitypub/user-id/10",
    "publicKeyPem":"-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----\nMIIBoj...XAgMBAAE=\n-----END PUBLIC KEY-----\n"}}

Data Flow

Analysis

Assets

1. Service Availability: The availability of our or foreign servers.
2. Instance Reputation: We hope our project does not live on a spam instance.
3. Project Reputation: The reputation of an individual project.

Actors

1. Script Kiddies: Boored teens, willing to do some illegal stuff without deep knowledge of tech details but broad knowledge across internet discussions. Able to do some bash / python scripting.
2. Experienced Hacker: Hacker with deep knowledge.
3. Hacker: Hacker with some knowledge.
4. Malicious Fediverse Member: Malicious Members of the fediverse, able to operate malicious forge instances.
5. Malicious Forge Admin: Admin of good reputation forge instance in the fediverse.
6. Federated User: Members of good reputation forge instance in the fediverse.

Threat

1. tbd

Mitigations

1. tbd

DREAD-Score

Threat	Damage	Reproducibility	Exploitability	Affected Users	Discoverability	Mitigations
1.	… tbd
2.	… tbd

Threat Score with values between 1 - 6

• Damage – how severe would the damage be if the attack is successful? 6 is a very bad damage.
• Reproducibility – how easy would the attack be reproducible? 6 is very easy to reproduce.
• Exploitability – How much time, effort and experience are necessary to exploit the threat? 6 is very easy to make.
• Affected Users – if a threat were exploited, how many percentage of users would be affected?
• Discoverability – How easy can an attack be discovered? Does the attacker have to expect prosecution? 6 is very hard to discover / is not illegal

Contributors

Reference