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Assume your devices are compromised

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191–197 of 197 posts

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#191
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or you could just print it up yourself. Why is it G's responsibility and not yours?

I'm not asking them to do it for free I'm like "please let me pay you for this".

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#192

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.

Cloudflare (and others) are working on it: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/zero-trust/browser-isola...

Thaf looks industrial strength, i.e., not necessarily packaged for individual sale.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#193
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Air-gapping really does seem like the only option for true security. It also makes it quite difficult to do anything of use with the machine. Since you can't control the supply-chain you should assume that the air-gapped machine is malicious/compromised and the only protection you have is the air-gap. Thus any USB used to transfer data/software to the air-gapped machine should be destroyed immediately afterwards and…

Air gapping doesn't really work these days. It could make noises (even with capacitors) to transmit data, or cause voltage fluctuations that something else could read. I can imagine bootstrapping a system with trusted hardware (assuming you could get it) by typing in a bootloader + SHA implementation by hand, then using a narrow hardware interface to copy a trustworthy, audited operating system kernel (assuming that…

You can't trust the compiler so you would have to type it in to assembly, and even that is questionable since huge amounts of the hardware's microcode is now reprogrammable.

I still think air-gapping works it's just that you need a pretty large airgap. Turn on the shower, fire up the microwave, move around, and hit some incorrect keys with lots of deleting when entering passwords.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#194
I thought this article was going to be about what people do when they assume their devices are compromised and yet realize it is too difficult to rebuild everything (which will just get compromised again, or the devices are compromised by design) so they alter their behavior to deal with the knowledge that the devices are compromised. So that would mean not keeping your most important secrets on any device and altering your behavior on all devices, assuming that communications are being viewed by someone, assuming location tracking is happening when your phone is on, and so on, which leads to some rational adjustments to your behavior. I think we're already there for anyone who has been paying attention (do you take your fitness tracker off when having sex? Do you try to manage when location services are turned on?). It's been called "the chilling effect" when applied to free speech. Maybe we need a new term for this kind of behavior effect applied to behavior on devices? I'd guess that one effect is reduced productivity in all digital aspects of life because people can't take full advantage of their digitally enhanced lives. Another would be an increased level of chronic stress due to worrying about being tracked (which everyone knows is ubiquitous. Maybe that should be the new name for IoT, "Ubiquitous Tracking". It all started with the "mother of all demos".)

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#195
post #181
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a tool for this[1,2], though it's still a work in progress (all the features work but I still need to finalise the QR data format and work on user-friendly interfaces). [1]: https://github.com/cyphar/paperback [2]: https://youtu.be/GI9rKdM9rB8

I wish I found your app before I wrote mine [1] :) you seem to be way better versed in cryptography than I am. What's the advantage of having the main document and the keys separated? [1]: https://g3rv4.com/2022/04/using-shamir-secret-sharing

I wouldn't say I'm very well-versed in cryptography. The reason they're separated is that it allows you to:

  * Further split up the trust such that the key shards can be held by one group but they don't have access to the document (maybe you keep a copy of the document with a lawyer but distribute the keys among your friends and family so that if your lawyer is hacked or bribed they can't reveal the secrets, same goes for if your friends conspire against you).
  * Make the shards small, independent of the document size, so that they're always practical for friends to store even if you have a very large document to save.
  * You can do a quorum expansion (create new shards that are compatible with the existing shards) without revealing the secret.
To be fair, for practical uses this is not super necessary but it adds flexibility without losing anything in return (I would argue the quorum expansion point is actually a useful feature).

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#197

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.

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

Which is why you need to put a tamper-proof box INSIDE a security box in a bank. Key to that box will be in your house, far away from bank personnel.

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