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Assume your devices are compromised

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Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#91

Post by Spooky23 »

jvanderbot wrote: post #43
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.

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.

Lawyer yes, safe deposit hell no.

Three reasons:

- Banks fubar safe deposit boxes all of the time, in a variety of ways.

- Once the bank figures out that you’re dead, it’s sealed without a court order.

- As you get older it’s more likely that you’ll screw up payments, lose keys or codes, etc.

Also, the attorney will advise your loved ones on what they can do. For example, you need a power of attorney for many things.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#94

Post by ryukafalz »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #82
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 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 k…

> flatpak portals are cool so long as you don't mind manually approving all file access

And by “manually approving all file access” you mean “opening the file in the file picker like normal”, right? There are some apps where using a file picker at all is awkward, but I’d argue in most applications it’s basically what you’d do anyway. Certainly most applications that non-developers would use.

The bigger problem is that lots of Flatpak applications still don’t use portals.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#95

Post by jvanderbot »

Spooky23 wrote: post #91
jvanderbot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lawyer yes, safe deposit hell no. Three reasons: - Banks fubar safe deposit boxes all of the time, in a variety of ways. - Once the bank figures out that you’re dead, it’s sealed without a court order. - As you get older it’s more likely that you’ll screw up payments, lose keys or codes, etc. Also, the attorney will advise your loved ones on what they can do. For example, you need a power of attorney for many things.

excellent point!

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#96

Post by Pxtl »

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 wish Google would sell me a letter mail with my Gmail recovery passwords on a nice durable laminated card.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#97

Post by woojoo666 »

hedora wrote: post #79
vorpalhex wrote: post #17

I struggle a lot with this. Secure isn't a binary state, it's a spectrum. At the same time, what is my risk model? Are my NSFW activities THAT interesting? What about my personal notes that contain health details? I keep an inventory of stuff in my home. Is that ok to keep in Dropbox? Sure the government can access it.. but even if a remote attacker does, is that useful to them? And of course, as things get more secu…

So, the question is why current systems are architected to make an unnecessary tradeoff between privacy/security and convenience, and then how to make something that's competitive with current systems, and doesn't make that tradeoff.

It's not really an unnecessary tradeoff but rather a very natural one. Convenient means easy to access, and easy to access means insecure. Of course what people really want by convenience is ease of access for only you, but creating this notion of "you" seems to be the hard part

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#98

Post by bouncycastle »

g3rv4 wrote: post #69
jeffparsons wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was once locked out of some pretty important accounts while traveling overseas. Ever since then, I've been thinking about the importance of being able to "shard" both secrets and authority. If I were to be imprisoned, for example, I might want my lawyer and family to be able to access all of my emails from two years ago up to one week ago. If I were to suddenly die, I would want my family to have full access to all…

here you can see how I'm using Shamir Secret Sharing, I gave clear instructions on how to use the shares and in what circumstances. based on their dynamics, I'm feeling pretty good. I know I have some people there that are tech savvy + some that will take good care of their shares and when they should send those to whom. Implementation is trivial (especially if you find a library) but maybe you can be inspired by my…

I was wondering, how much do you trust these tools? Cryptography can be extremely tricky to implement. For example, has the tool been checked for side-channel attacks? Has it had any other audits? (On the GitHub page of the library, it says it's no longer maintained)

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#99

Post by chrisweekly »

hanniabu wrote: post #74
CamelRocketFish wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which safe did you get?

Fire safes are so shitty you'd probably be better off buying a small one to keep your documents/backups in and then a larger one to put that safe in for double insulation.

Itis a small portable one; more akinto an outrageously bulky, heavy, awkward briefcase than a bank vault.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#100

Post by diego_sandoval »

jamesmishra wrote: post #81

People on Hacker News love discussing how to secure their information, but it's not clear if they have anything worth stealing.

If it's worth stealing, then it's unlikely that they'd talk about it on the open Internet just to justify their security scheme to some skeptic commenter on HN.
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