Assume your devices are compromised
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Assume your devices are compromised
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Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#2I routinely prune /home of sensitive info, and often move secrets into a Cryptomator or Veracrypt vault. I also compartmentalize my workflow. One for NSFW stuff, another for work, another for playing games, and the list goes on...I do this because a compromise of one system does not mean a compromise of my entire system. Virtual machines are great for this alongside Chrome/Firefox profiles for different things. How you slice and dice up your own system(s) is entirely up to you.
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#3These are fun thought experiments, but I think having a personal Disaster Recovery plan is a far more applicable security exercise. What would you do if you lost your phone? If you were locked out of your google account? If you forgot your password manager master password? If your home was destroyed in a fire? Having a secure plan for quickly recovering from these scenarios is more important than trying to keep state actors or cybergangs out of your system, unless you are a VIP.
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#4The lack of per-application isolation with desktops is one of those ugly truths people try and sweep under the rug.
I foresee two potential solutions to this.
1) Run everything in a VM like Qubes (essentially nerfs certain application like 3D acceleration without major R&D)
2) Utilize some container runtime to provide isolation for legacy applications and stub out features such as filesystem calls so they do not to be aware of its existence.
Microsoft tried to produce a crippled application runtime for Windows (UWP) with more security, but considering its lack of backwards compatibility and lesser feature-set it is not that surprising that adoption has been an uphill battle.
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#5The lack of per-application isolation with desktops is one of those ugly truths people try and sweep under the rug. I foresee two potential solutions to this. 1) Run everything in a VM like Qubes (essentially nerfs certain application like 3D acceleration without major R&D) 2) Utilize some container runtime to provide isolation for legacy applications and stub out features such as filesystem calls so they do not to b…
UWP has also been deprecated[0]
[0] https://www.thurrott.com/dev/258377/microsoft-officially-dep...
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#6I routinely prune /home of sensitive info, and often move secrets into a Cryptomator or Veracrypt vault. I also compartmentalize my workflow. One for NSFW stuff, another for work, another for playing games, and the list goes on...I do this because a compromise of one system does not mean a compromise of my entire system. Virtual machines are great for this alongside Chrome/Firefox profiles for different things. How y…
How do you compartmentalize?
With VMs or setting up different profiles?
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#7Sandboxing without any overhead is pretty accessible on any Linux distro, so I don't see why QubesOS should be the go-to choice. For example, I use firejail for all internet facing applications that I use (also for Wine and any proprietary software): https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/firejail#Using_Firejail_by_... The setup takes just a couple of minutes.
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#8Add network isolation to your defense in depth strategy. Close all link listeners and inbound firewall ports. Open authorized-only, outbound-only, ephemeral sessions.
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#9> If you’re not a cyber criminal or don’t have a lot of crypto to steal, this will probably never happen to you…
This is a misunderstanding of the threat in two ways.
First, malware is not purely, or even primarily, a targeted threat. It's actually a shockingly easy attack to scale, and by far the most victims are not any kind of high profile target. They are either unsophisticated or careless computer users, who installed something they shouldn't have. And the thing is, from most malware authors' perspective it doesn't matter that much whom they compromise. All victims can be monetised to some extent, and there is an elaborate ecosystem to make sure that monetisation happens in practice, not just in theory.
Second, the list of high value targets is definitely not limited to criminals and cryptocurrency owners. They might be the only people for whom the risk model is specifically the theft of a key file from the local disk.
But you know what else is a file on the local disk? The browser cookie jar, full of bearer tokens granting access to all your online services. Have a short Instagram name? An established but not particularly popular YouTube channel? Do your banking online? Have an account on Steam with some bought games? All of that is worth money to an attacker, and them realising that value will hurt you.
As for what to do about it? Hardware crypto is the technical answer, but it will take ages to move the ecosystem there. Until then, segregate the things whose compromise would be really harmful to separate devices from the day to day, ideally ones that are actively supported and have a good security model (e.g an iPad or Chromebook).
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#10The lack of per-application isolation with desktops is one of those ugly truths people try and sweep under the rug. I foresee two potential solutions to this. 1) Run everything in a VM like Qubes (essentially nerfs certain application like 3D acceleration without major R&D) 2) Utilize some container runtime to provide isolation for legacy applications and stub out features such as filesystem calls so they do not to b…
Apple will likely launch Armv9 CPUs (iDevice A16 and MacBook M2) this year. If they don't enable CCA and memory tagging, then we have to wait for Armv9 support in QEMU and a future Qualcomm SoC, https://www.anandtech.com/show/16584/arm-announces-armv9-arc...
> CCA introduces a new concept of dynamically created “realms”, which can be viewed as secured containerised execution environments that are completely opaque to the OS or hypervisor. The hypervisor would still exist, but be solely responsible for scheduling and resource allocation. The realms instead, would be managed by a new entity called the “realm manager”, which is supposed to be a new piece of code roughly 1/10th the size of a hypervisor.
> Applications within a realm would be able to “attest” a realm manager in order to determine that it can be trusted, which isn’t possible with say a traditional hypervisor. Arm didn’t go into more depth of what exactly creates this separation between the realms and the non-secure world of the OS and hypervisors, but it did sound like hardware backed address spaces which cannot interact with each other.