Getting Pidgin 2.10.10 out the door

Ethan Blanton elb at pidgin.im
Wed Oct 8 11:54:16 EDT 2014


Mark Doliner spake unto us the following wisdom:
> I think you and Ethan were basically saying the same things in the other
> email thread. As much as possible, we should try to avoid trusting the
> server. There is some gray area here, because obviously there are things
> where you MUST trust the server.

Agreed.  We should not trust the server to send us a valid uncorrupted
protocol stream.  Assuming that it *does* send us structurally valid
data, we should assume that any of that data that cannot be
independently verified is nominally correct.  If it sends us a roster
with entries we didn't put there, or spoofs IMs on a protocol without
end-to-end authentication, there's not very much we can do about that.
We should do our best to deal with whatever is sent, and it's not a
security vulnerability to believe what we're told.

So ... it's really the case where what we're told crashes us, breaks
the parser, etc. is a security bug.  Other problems may constitute a
denial of service or the like, but they may also just be the cost of
doing business as an IM client, not security flaws in the client.

Ethan


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