A security researcher made a tool that let them quickly check which of Cloudflare's data centers had cached an image, which allowed them to figure out what city a Discord, Signal, or Twitter/X user might be in.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/37638868 [email protected]

This affects Signal too

An issue with Cloudflare allows an attacker to find which Cloudflare data center a messaging app used to cache an image, meaning an attacker can obtain the approximate location of Signal, Discord, Twitter/X, and likely other chat app users. In some cases an attacker only needs to send an image across the app, with the target not clicking it, to obtain their location.

https://gist.github.com/hackermondev/45a3cdfa52246f1d1201c1e8cdef6117?ref=404media.co

Signal, an open-source encrypted messaging service, is widely used by journalists and activists for its privacy features. Internally, the app utilizes two CDNs for serving content: cdn.signal.org (powered by CloudFront) for profile avatars and cdn2.signal.org (powered by Cloudflare) for message attachments.

  • 🌶️ - knighthawk@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    10 days ago

    i think this would be true of basically any large service that had multiple data centers. whichever one catches your data is the one closest to you.

    the difficulty is accessing that data even if you can’t read it you still have the closest location.

    sounds to me like the Internet working as intended. if you want true privacy you need to take extra steps