184
I just made my first Lemmy PR
(github.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
184 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
58150 readers
4192 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Not a bad idea! The attack vector issue they mention in the PR comments is valid, though. Not displaying those errors gives an attacker no confirmation that a user whose account they're trying to attack exists, if they're trying known used passwords. But good on you doing what you can to contribute to the project!
There should be an error, but it shouldn't say whether it was the email or password that was wrong.
Fair point!
~~An attacker would still know the account exists, and they would know the password did not match.~~
~~Or you're assuring them that specific password is used by some account, just not this one. Which is even worse.~~
Read the comment you're responding to, again. Nothing about their suggestion leads to either of these scenarios.
Right, I misread "shouldn't" for "should".
Couldn't they just check instancename/u/accountname to see if the user exists?
Theoretically yeah. Depends on how quickly the attacker is working or if they have enough information to know where the account lives. If they're doing their due diligence, they could 100% confirm that. But if they aren't, they might just go to a random instance, try logging in, and see if it works.
By no means is it bad to offer a response, but it always risks giving an attacker more information than they need/the victim would want to have discovered about them.