People on Hacker News love discussing how to secure their information, but it's not clear if they have anything worth stealing.
Assume your devices are compromised
81–90 of 197 posts
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#82The 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 don't think it's so much "ugly truths people try and sweep under the rug" as "we do not yet appear to have a practical way to actually do anything about it without vastly reducing the usefulness of the system". There are ways to improve things a bit with your choice of sandboxing tech, but those are frequently either ineffective (oh good, an attacker who compromises can only get to my bank account, but not my SSH keys), high-friction (flatpak portals are cool so long as you don't mind manually approving all file access), or both.
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#83To 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'm too busy to take this idea past the handwaving stage, but it seems like someone should have already done the homework. Indeed. https://www.mightyapp.com/
I wonder if they could use firecracker or something to reboot the browser (and nuke persistent/ephemeral storage) on each page load. They could even bounce each user across all their hosts by default.
For trusted sites (ones the user logged into), this could be disabled.
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#84xkcd made the same observation years ago: https://xkcd.com/1200/
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#85People on Hacker News love discussing how to secure their information, but it's not clear if they have anything worth stealing.
A compromise of a device used to maintain a web site or a software package or product is a big step towards compromising the site, package or product itself.
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#86While true on a theoretical level this is largely impractical. To quote House >Cuddy: "How is it that you always assume you're right? >House: "I don't, I just find it hard to operate on the opposite assumption." If you're on a personal desktop at home you've got to place some level of trust in it. Same with local LAN. Once you get to more sophisticated server microservices then you can start thinking of the various c…
> Same with local LAN.
Why? I agree that you have to trust something in order to function, but I would think you could distrust the LAN pretty easily at least for certain levels of internal service. That is, it might be a struggle to distrust the LAN if you need, say, NFS or HTTP without internal domain name (to get certs), or maybe some games? But if all you need is internet access you could fully block internal connections, if you need some access you can probably rely purely on SSH, and failing all else you could run wireguard or such and force everything over that.
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#87I see a lot of trust in VMs, but jailbreaks exist, in the future I anticipate more spectre/meltdown type vulns, or even physics based attacks like rowhammer. Assuming my threat model was infinite, can I really trust vms?
If your threat model is infinite can you trust anything ?
The good news is that I think no one human is at risk of such an attack. The way I’d frame it: if you assume the NSA can break AES-256 in reasonable timeframes, or the CIA runs every single Tor node, that knowledge gets compartmentalized to such a degree that next to nobody knows, and attacks would only be used at the highest levels against the most significant state level threats. Hell, I wager they wouldn’t even risk parallel construction for fear that it’d tip their hand.
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#88People on Hacker News love discussing how to secure their information, but it's not clear if they have anything worth stealing.
Identities and financial information is worth stealing.
People, before you go nuts securing your computers routers and phones, talk to your doctors office about adding additional security to your medical records and freeze or add fraud alerts to your credit reports including NCTUE which I had never heard of until someone walked into Verizon and walked out with 4 unlocked iPhones after opening a new account in my name.
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#89[deleted]
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#90These 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 just wrote up instructions for accessing my backups for my wife and friend, and my critical accounts have dead-man switches to give my wife access to everything she would need.
Assuming what she needs is access to my email (yes) and gigabyte of photos from my drunk college days (no).