Re: Kyle's controlport bug

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Dec 23, 2007 at 05:55:44PM -0800, Kyle Williams wrote:
> 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"
> ---------------------

Interesting. Is it plausible to respond "well, don't do that then?"

There are a few other cases where Tor will freeze doing a dns resolve,
e.g. if you specify a fqdn rather than IP address for your hidden
service's location. But in your case above, it's not even Tor that's
doing the resolve -- so I have no idea how we'd go about "fixing" that.

I guess we could disallow filenames that look funny. Is there a valid
use case for netbios calls here, or do they always signal funny business?

> 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.

Sounds great. Yeah, if somebody can trigger it remotely, that's
definitely something to fix. I don't see how they could though.

Thanks!
--Roger