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Comment by theanomaly | Hacker News Reader

Ah I see, I forgot that in the SSL attack the attacker had to choose both certificate prefixes as opposed to just one. Thanks!

It does seem to me though that if I could coerce/direct the site into accepting one image that I created, I could manage to replicate a second, different file throughout the network. Obviously assuming I computed both images ahead of time and both image formats were unperturbed by the nonsense appended to file by the attack.

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When you register a new asset, the Edgemesh backend downloads it from origin itself to validate the hash you've calculated. And on replication the destination recalculates it on the payload (to make sure the asset replicated correctly).

Right. So let's say we have file A, which is an innocuous image file, and file A', which is a malicious image file, where MD5(A) == MD5(A'). Based on the MD5 prefix collision attack, I should be able to construct two such files A and A'.

I get an edgemesh site to accept file A (perhaps the site allows me to upload a user avatar, upload an image on a forum, etc). I then behave as a node in the mesh, and receive file A. When I get a request to replicate file A to someone else, I send them file A', they check the MD5 hash, and the hash matches. Not seeing how that doesn't work?

It is admittedly a narrow attack, but I think it works.

why not upload the malicious file directly?

Because you could bypass filtering / approval mechanisms, or automatic image processing that could defang a malicious image.

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