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Assume your devices are compromised

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Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#51

Post by g3rv4 »

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…

yeah, I've been thinking a lot about it... Shamir Secret Sharing and splitting the shares in a way that makes sense to me have me piece of mind.

I even wrote a trivial console app to let my wife restore my secrets if I were to drop dead tonight.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#52

Post by g3rv4 »

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.

Shamir Secret Sharing could be the answer you're looking for... I'm sleeping better at night

here's a quick blog post I wrote with my plan. The app is trivial to write if you find a library for your preferred language

https://g3rv4.com/2022/04/a-plan-for-my-secrets

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#54

Post by hedora »

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.

You can reset your lastpass password if you have access to any machine that was recently logged into it.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#55

Post by hedora »

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…

This puts 100% of the trust on shared, high value server farms controlled by organizations that have a financial incentive to misuse people's data.

Edit: I guess that meshes with the article title; assume other people's servers are compromised too.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#56

Post by hedora »

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…

Does per-application isolation actually stop local privilege isolation in practice on any popular operating system?

Even hypervisors routinely have security issues. How often does qubes sandbox get broken by a zero day?

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#57

Post by chasil »

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 do all my monetary transactions on an OpenBSD desktop with their Chrome port.

This version of Chrome is a bit old (v93) but it is built with pledge().

I am running it on an older Core 2 Quad Q9550 where I have been able to completely remove the Intel ME malware (I posted the wiped bios elsewhere).

I hope that this is enough.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#58

Post by greggsy »

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.

I personally wouldn’t go to the extent of using CLI tools, as my next of kins and family members aren’t at all technical. A printout of my 1Password emergency kit in a safe deposit box is probably doable, but then what - 598 passwords to projects on an old git repo on an ancient Synology NAS, or a throwaway account for some random website?

There is probably a lot to be said to curate your accounts to assist those sifting through your estate.

The ability to pass your information legacy is important, and complicated. The trope of your mother going through their mother’s papers and finding a long lost love letter - or an unfinished manuscript - is equally plausible today. What secrets lurk in your DMs, Messenger and Signal history? Does your draft blog post actually contain some amazingly insightful observation?

Maybe your family’s memory of you could be enriched with this information? …maybe not?

At the end of (your) day(s), you might take those secrets to your grave, and it’s unlikely that your tombstone will include your GUID, or the Glacier storage URI where your online self will remain until the TOS states otherwise.

REST In Blob

EDIT: RAM-mento Moar-i(sorry, got carried away.. couldn’t help myself :)

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#59

Post by eternityforest »

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…

My plan is just printed backup recovery codes for things that need 2FA, written master passwords, and normal hard disk backups.

The extra hidden part of the plan is that I try to avoid things that aren't tracable to a trusted human help desk. Anything that involves the words "manage your own private key" is a point of failure that needs a lot of care.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#60

Post by eternityforest »

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…

Or, just don't install viruses.

On Linux I'm sure some AppArmor or flatpak whatever will be the norm one day, once all the kinks are worked out... but for now it seems to work surprisingly well to just not install stuff that isn't popular and trusted.

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