d2 Deleting Diaspora: Practical attacks for profile discovery and deletion
Stephan Schulz, Thorsten Strufe · 2013
With over 400,000 active users, Diaspora is the largest decentralized Online Social Network, today. Decentralization entails complications, especially for user discovery and meaningful authorization. Analysing the system, we identified two vulnerabilities and implemented exploits that could be used to first locate a large fraction of the users, and then delete their profiles including all information from the system entirely, without any privileges whatsoever. We show the feasibility of both attacks, and provide means for mitigation as well as general recommendations to avoid such vulnerabilities in decentralized systems in the future.