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

mprimi.github.io

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

#121

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

mprime1 wrote: post #98
huehehue wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bounty password looks like 2 names, a type of flower, and a two word object. That significantly reduces the search space. Though, it's likely at least one of those words are non-standard or wouldn't be found in any wordlist.

All words appear in some wordlist. This is the kind of password I use to protect my actual secrets. So if someone is able to crack it, I'd like to know. The bounty is for a 'realistic' use case.

If you want to avoid wordlist vulnerabilities, try this:

Choose a lyric from a favorite song. Concatenate the first letter of each word in the lyric. Example:

“Rock the Casbah Sharif don't like it”

Becomes:

rtcsdli

Add capitalization or numbers/special characters according to your own pref. For example, maybe your decide to alternate lower and upper case and always end with a bang:

rTcSdLi!

Although you have to use the same capitalization rules for all passwords if you have any hope of remembering them.

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

#122

Post by mprime1 »

woodruffw wrote: post #111
mprime1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first few times I shared this with (security professional) colleagues and friends, they'd dismiss it right away "this can't possibly work", but it was because they _assumed_ it didn't work (too simple). Attaching a challenge made a big difference, they'd spend 5 minutes trying to crack it and, in the process, realize it is actually sound (despite the simplicity).

I think this is very cool, and from a cursory look you've made most of the right design choices (to the extent that the Web Crypto API allows). That being said, I think most security professionals (myself included!) aren't equipped to outright "crack" this kind of thing in just a few minutes, and most should know better than to think that their inability to do so implies soundness. With that in mind, here are some th…

Thank you.

> most security professionals (myself included!) aren't equipped to outright "crack" this kind of thing in just a few minutes

When I say 'crack' in this context, I mean review the scheme and point out any obvious flaws, like you just did!

> SHA-1 -> SHA2-256

I should do this!

> reuse an IV

Indeed (there is a fine-print in the creator page that says "don't reuse across messages", but I should just regenerate proactively)

Thank you very much for the great comment!

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

#124

Post by quickthrower2 »

One possible attack is someone changing either the encrypt or decrypt source code, either via Github (if they get access to the OP account) to log keystrokes.

Or if someone has hosted it themselves then hack that hosting provider.

Or they could do something like this: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/24/17275982/myetherwallet-ha...

Phishing is another potential one. Browser extensions, or supply chain attack on packages they use.

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

#125

Post by nashashmi »

redbell wrote: post #118

> Crack me if you can This reminds me of LifeLock CEO's Todd Davis public challenge [1] when he revealed his Social Security number prominently on his site and billboards with overconfidence that his identity cannot be stolen but, unfortunately, he's been a victim of identity theft at least 13 times. 1. https://www.wired.com/2010/05/lifelock-identity-theft/

He also ended up leaving the company after it was learned he was guilty of a previous felony for identity fraud.

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

#126

Post by blintz »

Cool project! This stuff is all possible thanks to the SubtleCrypto API (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SubtleCrypt...), which became widespread in browsers in the last ~5 years. It's so great we don't have to use weird libraries (some with pretty gnarly side channel leakage) to do cryptography anymore.

It wouldn't be that crazy for the browser to do the encryption part for me, right? Like, what if in the 'save this page' dialog my browser actually did the encryption, and then generated this 'self-decrypting page' for me if I checked a box saying "encrypt with password"? Would be a nice way for regular non-technical people to encrypt things and send them to each other.

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

#127

Post by createdapril24 »

mprime1 wrote: post #116
createdapril24 wrote: post #87

This has some desirable security properties, but I would like to see more analysis on the security side (not just: is secure or is not secure). Passwords: - Easy to memorize. Pro: Does not rely on a device, can be recovered if devices stolen. - Easy to phish. Con: Attacker can use a look-a-like page, click-jacking, and pixel extraction (frame stealing) attacks to get password & secret. - Easy to brute force. Con: Rel…

Thank you for the comment and thoughts. Agree with most, disagree with some (easy to brute-force?), but I wanted to comment on this in particular: > Easy to phish. Con: Attacker can use a look-a-like page, click-jacking, and pixel extraction (frame stealing) attacks to get password & secret This to me is the most glaring "vulnerability". i.e. I use this to exchange letters with my friend Bob. Now someone impersonates…

I agree that each person/organization should look at the security properties of a system and assess their risk against what technology is appropriate. It's entirely reasonable that as a non-targeted person with low value secrets, many of the attacks here don't have ROI for a potential attacker and as a result are neither likely or impactful.

What's important is that other persons and organizations who may be targeted - that they choose what technology to use, knowing what kinds of attacks are possible. For example a human rights activist might very well be targeted by phishing attacks and choose not to store secrets by this method.

I am just trying to enumerate the properties so that persons/organizations can evaluate a match to their use case. I don't believe any system is perfect for all use cases and I don't hold any system to such a standard.

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

#128

Post by admax88qqq »

createdapril24 wrote: post #107
admax88qqq wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Con: Eventually the secrets will become exposed due to advances in crypt-analysis You can claim this con for literally any crypto. And I'm not actually sure it's a reasonable assumption. Block ciphers seem to be pretty unbreakable so far. Even good ol Triple-DES is secure in practice barring some caveats (don't encrypt more than a certain amount of data) I'd wager if I gave you a real world message encrypted with A…

That's a good point, I wasn't very specific about this (trying to keep it concise). To be specific here, the con is that there isn't what the industry calls Cryptographic Agility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_agility . It is not true this con applies to all cryptography (e.g. look at TLS). It has more to do with how cryptography is configured, parameters are negotiated and keys are managed, than with p…

Agility does nothing to stop the "ciphertext from the past is broken due to crypto improvements". It's just a means to shorten response time to crypto breaks for _new_ traffic.

This project is plenty agile, upgrading the primitive is very easy as it's not a communication protocol but a data at rest protocol.

> this one doesn't have parameter negotiation and key management

You're thinking in terms of live communication protocols between endpoints. There is no "parameter negotiation" when you are both the sender and receiver of a static ciphertext.

There is no existing remediation for protecting your existing ciphertexts against future cryptanalysis.

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

#129

Post by mprime1 »

redbell wrote: post #118

> Crack me if you can This reminds me of LifeLock CEO's Todd Davis public challenge [1] when he revealed his Social Security number prominently on his site and billboards with overconfidence that his identity cannot be stolen but, unfortunately, he's been a victim of identity theft at least 13 times. 1. https://www.wired.com/2010/05/lifelock-identity-theft/

I'm not that confident in my tool.

That said, I ask myself every day if having my public identity associated to my project, website, etc. Was a good idea.

It certainly helped with jobs in the past, but it's scary to hear stories of devs impersonated by others.

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

#130

Post by quickthrower2 »

ortusdux wrote: post #2

"Do you think this cannot possibly be secure? Great, prove it. This secret contains the recovery key for a Bitcoin wallet. Crack it and take my money!" Love it.

Notice they have also given clues to what the password words are. So with brute force, maybe spending a good portion of the bounty on cloud resources, you might crack it that way :-)
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