If your objection is honored, it will be applied going forward

shoutout to the multiple people flagging this post as misinformation 😂

(I don't know or care if OP's screenshot is genuine, and given that it is in /c/shitposting it doesn't matter and is imo a good post either way. and if the screenshot in your comment is genuine that doesn't even mean OP's isn't also. in any case, from reading some credible articles posted today on lemmy (eg) I do know that many equally ridiculous google AI answer screenshots are genuine. also, the song referenced here is a real fake song which you can hear here.)

Indeed, the only thing WhatsApp-specific in this story is that WhatsApp engineers are the ones pointing out this attack vector and saying someone should maybe do something about it. A lot of the replies here don't seem to understand that this vulnerability applies equally to almost all messaging apps - hardly any of them even pad their messages to a fixed size, much less send cover traffic and/or delay messages. 😦

and later it will turn out that the AI solution was actually two clickworkers in a trenchcoat

xzbot from Anthony Weems enables to patch the corrupted liblzma to change the private key used to compare it to the signed ssh certificate, so adding this to your instructions might enable me to demonstrate sshing into the VM :)

Fun :)

Btw, instead of installing individual vulnerable debs as those kali instructions I linked to earlier suggest, you could also point debootstrap at the snapshot service so that you get a complete system with everything as it would've been in late March and then run that in a VM... or in a container. You can find various instructions for creating containers and VMs using debootstrap (eg, this one which tells you how to run a container with systemd-nspawn; but you could also do it with podman or docker or lxc). When the instructions tell you to run debootstrap, you just want to specify a snapshot URL like https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20240325T212344Z/ in place of the usual Debian repository url (typically https://deb.debian.org/debian/).

A daily ISO of Debian testing or Ubuntu 24.04 (noble) beta from prior to the first week of April would be easiest, but those aren't archived anywhere that I know of. It didn't make it in to any stable releases of any Debian-based distros.

But even when you have a vulnerable system running sshd in a vulnerable configuration, you can't fully demo the backdoor because it requires the attacker to authenticate with their private key (which has not been revealed).

But, if you just want to run it and observe the sshd slowness that caused the backdoor to be discovered, here are instructions for installing the vulnerable liblzma deb from snapshot.debian.org.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/evaluating-the-impact-of-tunnelvision

Sounds like it requires that your DHCP server is hostile, which is actually a very small (though nonzero, yes) number of the attack scenarios that VPNs are designed for

In most situations, any host on the LAN can become a DHCP server.

“there are no ways to prevent such attacks except when the user’s VPN runs on Linux or Android” is a very funny way of saying “in practice applies only to Windows and iOS”.

No. There are certainly ways of mitigating it, but afaict no Linux distros have done so yet.

The vast majority of LANs do not do anything to prevent rogue DHCP servers.

Just to be clear, a "DHCP server" is a piece of software which can run anywhere (including a phone). Eg, if your friend's phone has some malware and you let them use the wifi at your house, someone could be automatically doing this attack against your laptop while they're there.

VPNs have several purposes but the big two are hiding your traffic from attackers on the local area network and concealing your location from sites that you visit.

If you're using a VPN on wifi at a cafe and anyone else at the cafe can run a rogue DHCP server (eg, with an app on their phone) and route all of your traffic through them instead of through the VPN, I think most VPN users would say the purpose of the VPN has been defeated.

because i thought the situation described by the post was tragicomic (as was somewhat expressed by the line from it quoted in the post title)