Comment by galadran | Hacker News Reader

Comment by galadran | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> The crux of your argument seems to be "it is more valuable to be able to point an IOT device at the wrong IP than it is to get UXSS on a machine on that network". That seems obviously wrong to me for any user, technical or not.

If PiHole is malicious, there is already an attacker on your network, DNS Spoofing is just one example of the possible consequences. The PiHole can also port scan, connect to services etc. I don't think mounting an effective phishing attack on a user would be very hard.

My point is that both scenarios are catastrophic, and its hard to justify choosing one over the other on the grounds "the developer might be malicious". Telling people "don't worry a DNS server can't do much" is massively understating the problem, considering all the local network devices directly exposed to the PiHole device and the fact it is the DNS server.

As I said, I use both and cross my fingers that Mozilla / Open Source code review / the GDPR mitigates the risk of a bad developer

OK, so there's an attacker on the network in both cases (UXSS and the worst-case-dnsmasq-vuln). So, to compare the two, you look at what else you can do -- and UXSS clearly wins there. "It wouldn't be hard to mount a phishing attack" -- maybe? Except on the most valuable phishing domains, which already have HSTS -- and the UXSS alternative is that I literally control your browser which is clearly worse since I have almost definitionally attained the goal of the phishing attack! And if I really want to just steal your password instead of just using your session, I'm guessing "full control of the DOM everywhere" will help with that.

I have also already argued that an extension does not need to be malicious -- just buggy -- to get UXSS.

>If PiHole is malicious, there is already an attacker on your network

In contrast, UXSS provides an attacker on your network that already has access to everything inside your browser. That's banking, email, keylogging credit card numbers, etc. That's the end game right there.

A malicious rPi on your network is quite a few steps away from there, you'd still have to phish and deal with HTTPS/browser security and unlike UXSS that only gets you one set of credentials.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com