Dragonfly is an open source P2P-based file distribution and image acceleration system. Prior to 2.1.0, 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. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.1.0.
Two separate operations in a product require different amounts of time to complete, in a way that is observable to an actor and reveals security-relevant information about the state of the product, such as whether a particular operation was successful or not.