why are some messages leaking while others seem to remain private? - @punkmonk.termux

You're seeing the private messages that are unboxed on the server. Because the pub only has access to it's own private key, it would be unable to unbox messages from other people.

it might be useful to know who this might impact. is it accurate to say that only private messages that were posted via a public facing web client? maybe there could be scenarios where that wouldn't be the case, but that seems to be the pattern and wanted to verify. - %ytjlIM4...

ssb-ws allows sbot.query requests out of the box, so if you have websockets enabled all a person would need to do is run an ssb-ws query directed at your public key in order to request your private messages over the wire.

I think if you're behind NAT it'd be pretty hard for someone to request your private messages over ws. However, if you're sharing wifi with someone who knows how to do this, it'd be pretty easy to do this. It'd also be easy to do this to a pub, or anyone who's connecting via cjdns (or not mesh networking software).

It could be that the connections layer that @arj implemented would protect against this attack, as long as you've not enabled websockets.

But I wonder if it'd be possible to do this over tcp/ip connections too? Those are enabled by default, as far as I know.

But we also gotta keep in mind that the connections layer was implemented in September 2018, and this vulnerability was first introduced in March 2018.

The thing that is really concerning to me is that no one who hasn't been kicked out of the ssbc has responded to this security vulnerability yet (or opened an issue on Github). It'd be good to know whether or not this effects the larger group of people who are using Patchwork.

I'm not using private messages in a way that I'd be embarrassed or my security would be compromised if someone had access to them. In theory all cryptography will be broken, someday, so I'm not sending things I wouldn't want someone to read.

However, if I'd used Dark Crystal to back up a cryptocurrency wallet private key, I'd be moving those coins about right now to a new private key.

It's impossible to know if anyone knew how to use this attack to fetch private messages, but better safe than sorry in my opinion.