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Security: ipfs/ipfs-companion

Security

SECURITY.md

Security notes

The IPFS protocol and its implementations are still in heavy development. This means that there may be problems in our protocols, or there may be mistakes in our implementations. And — though IPFS is not production-ready yet — many people are already running nodes on their machines, so we take security vulnerabilities very seriously.

Reporting security issues

If you discover a security issue in ipfs-companion, please bring it to our attention right away!

If you find a vulnerability that may affect live deployments — for example, by exposing a remote execution exploit — please send your report privately to security@ipfs.io Please do not file a public issue.

If the issue is a protocol weakness that cannot be immediately exploited, or something not yet deployed, just discuss it openly.

Local build and source verification

Security-conscious users can confirm that downloaded package does match source code.

Required steps:

  1. Download package version that is to be verified
  2. Check out sources of the same tag
  3. Build package from sources using yarn dev-build command.
    As a result, you will have freshly built packages in build/ directory
  4. Unzip contents and compare manually or use handy one-liners below.

Convention used in examples below:

  • ipfs-firefox-addon1.xpi and ipfs-firefox-addon2.xpi are equal and match Git sources
  • ipfs-firefox-addon3.xpi contains changes not present in current sources

Compare SHA-256

Note that XPIs are unzipped before being piped to sha256sum:

$ diff -q <(unzip -p  ipfs-firefox-addon1.xpi|sha256sum|cut -f1 -d' ') <(unzip -p  ipfs-firefox-addon3.xpi|sha256sum|cut -f1 -d' ') && echo same || echo not_same

Sample output for files with matching contents:

$ diff <(unzip -v -l ipfs-firefox-addon1.xpi | cut -c 1-9,59-,49-57 | sort -k3) <(unzip -v -l ipfs-firefox-addon2.xpi | cut -c 1-9,59-,49-57 | sort -k3)  && echo same || echo not_same
same

Sample output for files with different contents:

$ diff -q <(unzip -p  ipfs-firefox-addon1.xpi|sha256sum|cut -f1 -d' ') <(unzip -p  ipfs-firefox-addon3.xpi|sha256sum|cut -f1 -d' ') && echo same || echo not_same
Files /proc/self/fd/11 and /proc/self/fd/12 differ
not_same

Inspect differences

It is possible to list package contents with CRC-32 checksums provided by ZIP container:

$ unzip -v -l ipfs-firefox-addon1.xpi | cut -c 1-9,59-,49-57 | sort -k3

To compare two packages in one command:

$ diff <(unzip -v -l ipfs-firefox-addon1.xpi | cut -c 1-9,59-,49-57 | sort -k3) <(unzip -v -l ipfs-firefox-addon3.xpi | cut -c 1-9,59-,49-57 | sort -k3) && echo same || echo not_same

Sample output for two different versions of XPI:

$ diff <(unzip -v -l ipfs-firefox-addon1.xpi | cut -c 1-9,59-,49-57 | sort -k3) <(unzip -v -l ipfs-firefox-addon3.xpi | cut -c 1-9,59-,49-57 | sort -k3) && echo same || echo not_same
5,7c5,7
<      174 d991ba90 defaults/preferences/prefs.js
<    37615          30 files
<     2270 06d511c2 harness-options.json
---
>      225 5b287a38 defaults/preferences/prefs.js
>    38998          30 files
>     2315 6291e716 harness-options.json
13c13
<      385 c2c13711 options.xul
---
>      513 4f3e0732 options.xul
33,34c33,34
<     6376 45297f28 resources/ipfs-firefox-addon/lib/index.js
<      966 e48f0540 resources/ipfs-firefox-addon/lib/package.json
---
>     7517 7565d9af resources/ipfs-firefox-addon/lib/index.js
>      984 83079aef resources/ipfs-firefox-addon/lib/package.json
not_same

There aren’t any published security advisories