On 12/21/2011 01:11 AM, k...@hxbc.us wrote: > On Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:02:38 +0200, Dimitris Glynos wrote: >> Hello all, >> >> I was wondering if pidgin could allow for certain chat types >> to be flagged as private and not transmit these over dbus. >> I don't know how much dbus is hardwired to pidgin (is it used >> also for capturing the messages displayed on the pidgin GUI?) >> but the fact that a local attacker can access OTR plaintext >> from a dbus session monitor is quite unnerving. > > a local attacker can already ptrace the pidgin process and do > pretty much anything.
Yes, the word 'local' is used incorrectly in the original post. Consider a remote attacker that exploits some app running in the same desktop session as pidgin. It is trivial to fork-exec a dbus session monitor from there and retrieve the sensitive info. Now, regarding ptrace although it was generally possible in the past to attach to processes of the same user, this has been restricted somewhat in modern distro's. Specifically, distro's like Ubuntu allow (non-root) ptrace only to processes that are children of the ptrace-caller. For more info on this, have a look here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/Roadmap/KernelHardening#ptrace_Protection Hope this clarifies things a bit, Dimitris _______________________________________________ OTR-dev mailing list OTR-dev@lists.cypherpunks.ca http://lists.cypherpunks.ca/mailman/listinfo/otr-dev