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The Personal Security Checklist

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41–50 of 116 posts

Re: The Personal Security Checklist

#41

There's an obvious tradeoff having an authenticator (2FA/OTP) separate from your secure password manager. If you lose the device with credentials, you're screwed. It's really easy to lose access to a device (and usually without advance notice). Or you can override the 2FA, and then you're back to hoping the verification procedure of overriding 2FA is stronger than a dedicated attacker. A password manager managing 10…

> Maybe the best strategy is a hardware key with printed backup code?

Or register more than one (preferably three) hardware key. It sidesteps all of these issues. They are very resilient and act as backups.

Re: The Personal Security Checklist

#42

The flaw with this list is that it treats all risks as equally likely and does not distinguish between various threat landscapes. Few people are high value enough to merit the effort required to capture a face from CCTV, generate a mask from the image, get physical access to their device, and use the mask to unlock. So for almost everyone, faceid is fine.

I don't see the flaw as there is obvious "recommended", "optional", "advanced".

List is "personal security checklist" so it also gives some context that you can infer "threat landscape", which I understand would be average Joe, not journalist, not a CEO, not a drug dealer, just normal employee having one bank account buying stuff online and going on vacations in his own country.

If you want to implement everything that is "optional" in your life it will be security larping.

Re: The Personal Security Checklist

#44
While I always prize people how invest time and share results of their work to the community I found that list a bit of a collection of common things, some not really good beliefs etc, so my two cents little contribution:

- two factor auth depending on the secondary factor might be a vulnerability itself: suppose you use Google Authenticator on your Android "phone", what if a third party deliberate action DOS your phone (not functioning anymore, locked etc, no matter the reason): you are cut out of other available/working service because of the OTP SPOF, so at least chose recovery roads if the OTP can't be used in all cases, and test them regularly;

- a "secure password manager" is something you read in code and understand everything, also is as secure as the environment it live on, for instance on Android/iOS/other proprietary OS you can't trust any password manager not because themselves but because you can't trust the environment you are in, the only option is using only community born and community developed FLOSS [1] witch is limited by the hw+firmware layer on top on nearly all modern common hw;

- breach alerts are generally good BUT also a potential privacy issue, follow news on services you use is the good (and hard, not because of nature but because most services do not offer a simple very-low-traffic RSS feed/ML alerts with just critical infos) BUT remember you give personal infos, public, but still personal, to a third party witch maybe honest and/or maybe itself breached just to munge data from it;

- safe backups are backups you restore regularly and that are stored offline. The offsite backup is for physical safety (earthquake, thief at home, etc) BUT it's not really "safe" since is not really under your control (unless you are big enough to have geographically distributed personal infra);

- for emails, having many it's ok, as long as you give some to your contacts so they can know and trust that's still you who write from another address, but the main point are mails themselves: they are personal, you need to have them, witch means do sync/download your maildirs locally in an automated fashion and USE them locally with an MUA (or if you really need a personally hosted WebMUA, because emails does not matter only in terms of "current capacity to read and send" but also search through your maildirs, perhaps through all at once if they are many, having your MUA to work with not n-th different WebMails from different providers etc AND have mailbox portability witch means having personal domain names so to been able to switch from a hosting partner to another without changing address. Also a personal mail typically allow many aliases, witch are useful to give to services from retail to NL etc to been able to detach easily and to know where the spam came from (i.e. if a spam mail arrive to my ebay065 mail alias that means someone from ebay got mail mail), oh BTW there is no "secure email provider" (if you are yourself the provider) just different services you can choose to trust or not, without much data to decide;

- for chat, I laugh a bit because if the author talk about chat on smartphones they do not matter how open or safe they are, they are on surveillance capitalism platform so NONE can be trusted for privacy, even one you write yourself;

- "use a VPN", in the sense of commercial VPNs providers is a VERY BAD ADVISE, my ISP can spoof my connection but it's a company from my country subjects to laws I know, I can have a local litige with my local lawyer etc a third party VPN service based in British Virgin Island, Cayman or You-name-it remote -stan it's essentially protected by the impossibility in practice to sue it, so it's the opposite of safety: you voluntary give 100% of your network usage, perhaps with a unique account for multiple devices, to a third party renouncing to your local laws protection. VPNs have ONLY a safety purpose: connecting LANs across the internet, witch means if you have a homeserver and you want to route all your traffic through a VPN is safe, otherwise might just be a means to circumvent Geoblocking NOTHING for safety nor privacy. Oh, BTW forcing a LAN-wide VPN especially through a commercial router is again not a good idea but at minimum a SPOF.

- for a safe LAN avoid wireless at all, at least limiting it to not-easy-to-connect-via-wires devices (smartphones) AND for ephemeral connections (guests at home etc).

- for desktops: IMVHO do NOT USE any antivirus, simply use OSes that do not have "try-to-execute and fallback thereafter", antiviruses especially proprietary ones are extremely invasive and not trusted beasts. Backups MUST BE for all data, not "just for important ones" because restore MUST BE a full restore from the system/configs to data. Partials backups are good recipes to make disasters.

[1] witch means code that many third parties with different interests, scattered around the world have seen from the start, when the codebase was small enough to be really understood ad a whole.

Re: The Personal Security Checklist

#45

This doesn’t talk about real world adversaries, only hypothetical countermeasures. It would be more useful to know how I’m likely to be attacked, not how to protect against every threat the author could possibly think of. For example, I want to know where the villains actually go when they want to dox someone. Then I can dox myself and do something about it. I have no idea where to start and wouldn’t want to pay mone…

Assuming you are a US citizen, you likely have no need to worry about FVEY [1] targeting you unless a judge has been convinced you are a very bad person and issues a warrant.

You do have to protect against cyber-criminals and potentially other nation state actors like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. These groups do not control infrastructure (like FVEY) and have a harder time targeting you. BTW, this is why FVEY are so determined to keep China out of 5G networks (they don't want to share).

To gain access to your things, these attackers typically rely on phishing emails and social engineering attacks. They try to convince your bank or cellular provider, etc. that they are you and then do bad things with, or to, your accounts.

The best protection against this is 2FA (Yubikeys and TOTP) and process isolation. Run a reasonably secure operating system (such as Qubes) to isolate your digital life. Be sure to do your online banking in a qube of its own separate from your email qube and your random web browsing qube. And avoid phone or email based 2FA when you can.

That's about it. If you do that, you'll probably be fine.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

Re: The Personal Security Checklist

#46
post #33

> You could store [2fa backup codes] in your password manager Aaand we're down to single-factor authentication: your password from your password manager plus your backup codes from your password manager. I do recommend a password manager, but not to keep would-be-two factors in one vault. Also the very first item in the guide makes a blanket statement about dictionary words being really crackable. I forgave that one…

> statement about dictionary words being really crackable Every time I see this statement I immediately think: which dictionary? There are more languages than usual suspects (eg English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Mandarin) and L1/L2 speakers of those make up sizable portion of internet users. Are Welsh/Hungarian/Slovak dictionary words really as easily crackable than English ones? If you have dictionary for t…

If the hash is weak enough that you can afford massive wordlists like crackstation [1], then yes, those words will be in the list.

[1] https://crackstation.net/crackstation-wordlist-password-crac...

Re: The Personal Security Checklist

#47
post #33

> You could store [2fa backup codes] in your password manager Aaand we're down to single-factor authentication: your password from your password manager plus your backup codes from your password manager. I do recommend a password manager, but not to keep would-be-two factors in one vault. Also the very first item in the guide makes a blanket statement about dictionary words being really crackable. I forgave that one…

> but not to keep would-be-two factors in one vault.

So where? Having them physically spread around my house? in my PO BOX? Each have been cracked before, or are lost all the time (even by a simple fire).

What can an average person do better than remember one strong password?

Re: The Personal Security Checklist

#48
post #33

> You could store [2fa backup codes] in your password manager Aaand we're down to single-factor authentication: your password from your password manager plus your backup codes from your password manager. I do recommend a password manager, but not to keep would-be-two factors in one vault. Also the very first item in the guide makes a blanket statement about dictionary words being really crackable. I forgave that one…

A typical password manager is two factors: something you have (the password database) and something you know (the master password).
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