zlacker

>>aendru+(OP)
This is why mastodon , webfinger and ACME uss .well-known uri prefix. .well-known is reserved and you can't e.g. make a bucket named .well-known

It's funny the bluesky devs say they implemented "something like webfinger" but left out the only important part of webfinger that protects against these attacks in the first place. Weird oversight and something something don't come up with your own standards

>>arianv+53
What about serving the challenge file from the root or a near-root of the fully qualified url? Like www.domain.com/mastodon.txt or abc.freehost.com/mastodon.txt?

Maybe I'm old but what are some popular use cases for webfinger? (I'm just learning about it now)

>>Nick87+x6
The /.well-known/ path prefix is the standard name to use (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8615) so that any sort of “we’ll host user content from our domain” thing can block it. (Hosting user content from the user’s domain is fine and doesn’t need this restriction.)

A few things are effectively grandfathered in due to their vintage: /favicon.ico, /sitemap.xml and /robots.txt are the three that occur to me—so if you’re running something vaguely like S3, you’ll want to make sure users can’t create files at the top level of your domain matching at least those names.

But nothing new should use anything other than /.well-known/ for domain-scoped stuff, or else you run into exactly this problem.

>>chrism+m9
I learned something new today. I guess .well-known's purpose isn't well known!