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Assume your devices are compromised

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Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#41

Post by Ameo »

roastedpeacock wrote: post #4

The 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…

I think that the browser is going to eat the desktop/OS and that most apps will eventually be browser-based.

PWAs are the initial movement in that direction. As browser APIs expand and support more use-cases through WebAssembly, WebGPU, native filesystem APIs, etc. more and more apps that were primarily or only available as native can be supported in the browser.

I know that many people hate web apps because they're often slow, clunky, bloated, etc. but a lot of that is changing as the frontend ecosystem embraces new and more efficient frameworks and technologies. The browser provides everything one needs to build fast and responsive applications - It's an issue with incentives and culture more than anything to do with the fundamental tech.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#42

Post by megous »

smitty1e wrote: post #20

To that point, how many people run browser proxies in the cloud to obfuscate their location and minimize the blast radius if compromised? One could filter much of the crapology somewhere safe, and then have a relatively tidy local browsing experience. I'm too busy to take this idea past the handwaving stage, but it seems like someone should have already done the homework.

I run the browser under different OS user accounts, and make my display manager display the user account in the window title bar.

https://megous.com/dl/tmp/8eaa15e187fa9a2e.png (ff1 being the user)

I trust it more than browser's internal isolation solutions, like tab containers, which I like to use for other things, like testing web apps using different login sessions at once.

I'd hate a remote solution. ;) Though this is not for privacy but more for protection and better low effort isolation.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#43

Post by jvanderbot »

phphphphp wrote: post #35
daenz wrote: post #3

These 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…

I debate this with myself often. Short of renting a security box and telling people I trust about it, I haven’t come up with a strategy for the master password. At the moment, I’ve resigned myself to the feeling that if I lose my memory, maybe it’ll be the opportunity for a fresh start, and so losing everything is a feature not a bug.

Just send four trusted family members half of the passphrase in a sealed envelope and tell them what it's for. If your family has a lawyer or safe deposit box trusting that instead is a 1000x better option.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#45

Post by CamelRocketFish »

chrisweekly wrote: post #40
phphphphp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I debate this with myself often. Short of renting a security box and telling people I trust about it, I haven’t come up with a strategy for the master password. At the moment, I’ve resigned myself to the feeling that if I lose my memory, maybe it’ll be the opportunity for a fresh start, and so losing everything is a feature not a bug.

I wrote mine down and put it in an envelope containing a few other secrets in a small fire-resistant, waterproof safe which my wife knows how to open.

Which safe did you get?

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#46

Post by CamelRocketFish »

philjohn wrote: post #31
b112 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a death certificate, you don't need passwords, or even account numbers, to access savings, accounts at fiscal types of businesses. It helps pf course, to have account info, but just knowing the place of business is typically enough. For clarity, living people lose account numbers and access all the time. The death cert. gives you this same power.

Not for, eg, lastpass. Your master password is the key that decrypts your password vault. Some sort of escrow would be good, that unlocks a document with access instructions upon receipt of a valid death certificate.

Yes but lastpass contains your password to something like your bank account. You don’t need your password for your bank account if you have a death certificate is what the poster is saying.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#47

Post by [deleted] »

girzel wrote: post #37
daenz wrote: post #3

These 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…

All of my passwords are in the "pass" command line utility, where they're encrypted with gpg. I added my brother's gpg key as an encryption target, and his ssh key onto the sever where the git repo is stored, locked down to the git shell command. In the event of my untimely demise, my wife tells him the url of the git repo.

[deleted]

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#48

Post by usrn »

phphphphp wrote: post #35
daenz wrote: post #3

These 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…

I debate this with myself often. Short of renting a security box and telling people I trust about it, I haven’t come up with a strategy for the master password. At the moment, I’ve resigned myself to the feeling that if I lose my memory, maybe it’ll be the opportunity for a fresh start, and so losing everything is a feature not a bug.

I publish or write down most of the things I want to keep in that scenario.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#49

Post by privacyking »

digitallyfree wrote: post #18

If this is the kind of protection you want you should be running everything in seperate VMs and containers. Preferably you would run the hypervisor (perhaps a hardened bare-metal hypervisor) on your server and remotely connect to the instances with your client. The client is solely used for connecting to those instances. The hypervisor itself will need to be well protected and you do not want that accessible from you…

Or just use Qubes OS

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#50

Post by nyanpasu64 »

Ameo wrote: post #41
roastedpeacock wrote: post #4

The 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…

I think that the browser is going to eat the desktop/OS and that most apps will eventually be browser-based. PWAs are the initial movement in that direction. As browser APIs expand and support more use-cases through WebAssembly, WebGPU, native filesystem APIs, etc. more and more apps that were primarily or only available as native can be supported in the browser. I know that many people hate web apps because they're…

Will JavaScript-based web apps ever run as smoothly as FamiTracker (and to some degree Telegram Desktop) on a Core 2 Duo machine, or take up negligible memory (so you won't have to close some apps to start others) on today's 4-8GB machines?

But then again, modern native apps are dog slow on old hardware; Visual Studio 2022 would hang for over 10 seconds at a time, but it's arguably excusable since it doesn't support running on Windows 7 which I was doing.

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