RE: Kyle's controlport bug

["Kyle Williams" <kyle.kwilliams@xxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-or-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-or-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Roger Dingledine
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2007 10:16 AM
To: or-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Kyle's controlport bug

On Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 01:44:09PM -0800, Kyle Williams wrote:
> This is just a theory, no hard facts to back it up.
> When I'm messing around with Tor's ControlPort, I've noticed that my Tor
> traffic just hangs until whatever I'm doing on the ControlPort stops.
There
> have been a couple of times where I do something very wrong on the
> controlport and Tor just "freezes" (does not route any traffic) until I
> close my connection with the ControlPort.   I'm wondering if the same is
> true for when someone is fetching descriptors from the DirPort?

Hi Kyle,

I'd love to hear more details on this. It would be a bad bug indeed.
But I've never encountered or heard about anything like it, so far. :)

Thanks,
--Roger


Hi Roger,

Well, you know me, I've got a knack for breaking stuff while in the pursuit
of finding vulnerabilities. ;)

When the following command is used with Tor's ControlPort, Tor will
temporarily freeze until NetBIOS either resolves the request or times out.
This issue is specific to Windows, Linux and Mac are not affected.

---------------------
SETCONF LOG="notice file \\\\www.janusvm.com\\TEST\\notice.log"
---------------------

I've included a Flash Video of the issue, so you (or anyone else who's
curious) can SEE what it is I'm talking about.

http://www.janusvm.com/pub/Tor-Freeze.swf.html

I played with the Dirport for about an hour the other night, and it didn't
seem to suffer from the same issue.  I'll "focus" on the Dirport more after
the holiday rush is over, probably next year.

Hope this helps.

Best Regards,
Kyle