Dragonfly vulnerable to timing attacks against Proxy’s basic authentication

Description

Impact

The access control mechanism for the Proxy feature uses simple string comparisons and is therefore vulnerable to timing attacks. An attacker may try to guess the password one character at a time by sending all possible characters to a vulnerable mechanism and measuring the comparison instruction’s execution times.
The vulnerability is shown in figure 8.1, where both the username and password are compared with a short-circuiting equality operation.

if user != proxy.basicAuth.Username || pass != proxy.basicAuth.Password {

It is currently undetermined what an attacker may be able to do with access to the proxy password.

Patches

  • Dragonfy v2.1.0 and above.

Workarounds

There are no effective workarounds, beyond upgrading.

References

A third party security audit was performed by Trail of Bits, you can see the full report.

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory, please email us at [email protected].

Basic information

Type
reviewed
Severity
medium
Advisory on GitHub
Open advisory ↗
Repository advisory
Open repository advisory ↗
Source code
Browse source ↗
Published (advisory)
2025-09-17 20:02:30 UTC
Updated
2025-09-26 16:17:59 UTC
GitHub reviewed
2025-09-17 20:02:30 UTC
NVD published
2025-09-17

EPSS Score

Score Percentile
0.08% 23.39%

CVSS Scores

Base score Version Severity Vector
5.5 4.0
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:P Click to expand
Attack vector (AV:N)
Could be attacked over the internet or any normal routed network.
Attack complexity (AC:L)
Exploitation conditions are straightforward and stable.
Attack requirements (AT:N)
No additional preconditions are required beyond normal reachability.
Privileges required (PR:N)
No privileges are required.
User interaction (UI:N)
No user interaction is required.
Vulnerable system confidentiality impact (VC:N)
No confidentiality impact on the vulnerable system.
Vulnerable system integrity impact (VI:L)
Limited integrity impact on the vulnerable system.
Vulnerable system availability impact (VA:N)
No availability impact on the vulnerable system.
Subsequent system confidentiality impact (SC:N)
No confidentiality impact on subsequent systems.
Subsequent system integrity impact (SI:N)
No integrity impact on subsequent systems.
Subsequent system availability impact (SA:N)
No availability impact on subsequent systems.
Exploit maturity (threat) (E:P)
Proof-of-concept: public PoC exists; no reported exploitation and no known simplification tools.

Identifiers

CWEs

CWE id Name
CWE-208 Observable Timing Discrepancy
CWE-697 Incorrect Comparison

Credits

  • gaius-qi (reporter)

Affected packages (2)

Vulnerable version ranges and first patched releases as published by GitHub.

Ecosystem Package Vulnerable range First patched Vulnerable functions
go github.com/dragonflyoss/dragonfly < 2.1.0 2.1.0
go d7y.io/dragonfly/v2 < 2.1.0 2.1.0

References

cvelogic Threat Intelligence