attacker initiated MITM? #3
Description
This one is a long shot, but would it be possible to have an attack initiated MITM?
The planned remediated (signed peer records) for #2 depends on the idea that when Alice tries to connect to Bob, she connects only to the correct address given in a peer record signed by Bob. If Alice is running out of date, or modified, or incorrect software, and this causes her to connect via non-signed records then the fake colocation attack can still be used againts both Bob and Alice.
This means that Bob's security depends on Alice doing the right thing. Okay, maybe if Alice is penalized for running wrong software, that's okay, at least no one else will think that Bob is colocated.
But here is the idea: what if M could connect to A and B simultaniously, but somehow manipulate the handshake, so that A and B both thought they had received an incoming connection.
Using this issue to collect information on weather this is feasible.
- In some approaches to p2p NAT traversal, you have both ends of a connection attempt to reach each other, until one wins. I think maybe utp might do this? and webrtc?
- Some secure channels are asymmetric and you could not take data the server sends and make it look like a client. with other designs you could! those designs could be attacked.
- does libp2p use any of these?
- when libp2p connects to a peer (with an id) if it turns out to be a different peer, it drops the connection. I presume it does this but I need to see the code