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Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately

mprimi.github.io

11–20 of 385 posts

Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately

#11
So, the next step would be to have this in front of a S3 upload dropzone that generates a public link which self-expires after a few days?

As in, here's a link to a file, you know the password, it'll self-destruct (disappear) in 24 hours.

Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately

#14
This is password protected, so then an attacker must crack the password. The author exchanges the password over a phone call, which requires the password to be relatively weak, meaning the password is probably crackable. Exchanging the password via a second channel that the other user can copy and paste a more difficult password from to decyrpt the document might be more secure. The password may be more exposed, but an attacker would have to compromise both channels. Basically use two messaging platforms (one of which could be email) ideally where at least one channel is sent encrypted. For example if the other party is using their mobile phone to view the payload they should have a messaging app to copy and paste from that is at least encrypted in transit if not e2e.

Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately

#15

So, the next step would be to have this in front of a S3 upload dropzone that generates a public link which self-expires after a few days? As in, here's a link to a file, you know the password, it'll self-destruct (disappear) in 24 hours.

Sounds cool!

All I wanted to show with this project is the concept of self-contained, self-extracting, super-portable secrets.

Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately

#16
post #10
post #4

It would be awesome if this could be code-golfed into a small enough package to fit in a QR code.

Do you mind expanding? Specifically, what do you mean by de-golfed (I'm only vaguely aware of what 'kids' mean by code-golf these days, and I'm kinda lost on de-golfing). What would you like to fit into a QR code? A PortableSecret (e.g. html file)?

Not the original commenter, but if the whole HTML could be included, it would be nice. It is defenitely possible until certain data limits. However, you would need certain app to use it, since by default QR readers probably can’t benefit from it so that it actually increases the usability. File should be extracted and then opened with browser from correct path.

Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately

#17
post #7

neat tool. I would encrypt the payload type and extension tho >Some browsers disable window.crypto on local files and non-TLS servers which ones do that?

Brave and Safari that I know of. i.e. if you run the creator with a simple HTTP server on localhost:8080 it'll block the fetch to localhost:8080/foo

for local files as well?

Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately

#18

This is password protected, so then an attacker must crack the password. The author exchanges the password over a phone call, which requires the password to be relatively weak, meaning the password is probably crackable. Exchanging the password via a second channel that the other user can copy and paste a more difficult password from to decyrpt the document might be more secure. The password may be more exposed, but…

This is not meant as a solution. It's a demo of a self-contained, self-extracting, portable encrypted file.

That said, the password strength and the strength of the side-channel to transmit it depend on your use case.

If we were friends for example, I may not need to send you a password at all. I could just add some secret questions we both know in the hint.

Or, at the opposite side of the spectrum, I could send you a secret as email attachment and *include the password in the email itself*. This adds zero security in certain scenarios, but for example it keeps Google bots out of your private correspondence. Which is all I want sometimes.

Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately

#20
post #13

This is really cool! The "lost thumbdrive" comment makes me wonder if a browser from 20 years (or more) in the future will still have enough legacy functionality to decrypt these payloads.

Even if not, it's affordable to hire a programmer for a few hours to migrate the code to the newer API.
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