There needs to be a new browser standard for sandboxed html files (.htmlsbx files) that only open in a special sandboxed tab with no off-page connectivity allowed.It would be perfect for this.
Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately
341–350 of 385 posts
Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately
#342I noticed you are using pbkdf2 to convert password to key. It's recommended to use ARGON2 nowadays.
From some googling, pbkdf2 increases CPU usage to make brute force harder, scrypt increases memory usage to make brute force harder. ARGON2 increases CPU and RAM usage to make brute force harder.
There are other advantages as well, and it is considered the best key derivation function right now.
Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately
#343I did something similar in the past and called it emergency contacts [1]. Basically a encrypted json that can be decrypted online. I use it to store emergency contact information in case I got stranded without any own device at hand.
Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately
#344This is a really cool project! One thought that I have: would there be an issue sending this file in an unsecure context where MITM is a possibility? Alice sends Bob her HTML file over an unsecured medium, and Jane intercepts this traffic, and gives Bob a modified HTML file that will report the password back to Jane. Jane can set it up so that the browser still displays the local file as it's source, but has an HTTP…
100% agree. This is why I’m always a bit dubious of in-browser decryption. At any moment a little extra snippet of JS can be added to stealthily leak my secrets. There’s no great mechanism to ensure the JS I’m running is always the same JS I ran before. Compare this to a desktop app where I always know I’m running the exact same binary I ran last time. (And if I’m not then I’m probably already pwned anyway) For this…
It's important to be precise and clear-thinking when articulating problems, lest we identify the wrong one but believe it's the right one.
Your issue is not with the program being in-browser, but rather it being an online one that gets ~continually re-fetched and immediately trusted without verification.
Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately
#345Shameless plug: http://hypervault.github.io . Hypervault is a single HTML file (with no external dependencies) which allows you to encrypt files, and it outputs a single html file (with no external dependencies) with a copy of the hypervault decryption software packaged together with your encrypted data. To unlock a hyper vault, all that is needed is the encryption password (entered at creation time).
The source code mangling (uglification) is really doing a lot more harm than good.
Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately
#346I'm a security professional and this looks like a great tool for OP's use case, especially with strong passwords and great password hints. I think your secrets are well stored - unless your mother stores the password to these files insecurely, a problem that is not new to this solution. This also applies to most if not all challenges mentioned by other posters. Take phishing for example, at the moment all methods to…
> Someone adversarial to me could bribe a number of people to get answers to 10 different password hints. OP's hints are probably more generous than they need to be. (Indeed, knowing that password is name + flower + name + two-word-thing, plus the fact that there is no limit to the speed you could brute-force this, means that someone could probably make a custom dictionary and break this in a couple days.) But you ca…
>knowing that password is name + flower + name + two-word-thing, plus the fact that there is no limit to the speed you could brute-force this, means that someone could probably make a custom dictionary and break this in a couple days
Off topic, but in principle a sufficiently expensive key derivation could guard against this, right? Is there a reason why it isn't done? I wouldn't mind waiting a few minutes for my identity document to decrypt if I hardly ever access it. In that case the usability benefit of a fast key derivation algorithm seems minor.
It wouldn't even be hard to expose this functionality via a user interface -- say when a user is setting up a Portable Secret, let them click to select a security level between "low security" and "high security", where each security level corresponds to an estimated number of minutes it will take the secret to decrypt on a modern PC. Seems like it would make intuitive sense to grandma.
And with regard to the software vulnerabilities topic discussed above, as long as we're waiting a few minutes, we might as well make use of multiple key derivation algorithms in case one or more of them is shown to be weak.
Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately
#347I'm a security professional and this looks like a great tool for OP's use case, especially with strong passwords and great password hints. I think your secrets are well stored - unless your mother stores the password to these files insecurely, a problem that is not new to this solution. This also applies to most if not all challenges mentioned by other posters. Take phishing for example, at the moment all methods to…
Thank you for the insightful comments. Not looking for users TBH. :-) re: bug in the vendor implementation of cryptography. Doesn't this apply to everything you encrypt?
Anytime.
Re your question: of course. There are some things to consider:
1. These files do seem to have some persistence on either the sender’s, the recipient‘s or a shared machine. With long persistence in several places, the risk of unwanted access is being elevated. (Cloud instances and identity providers get popped, machines get viruses, etc) 2. As mentioned by a sibling comment, the encryption is your only layer of protection. 3. Browser’s are probably one of the top three targets of vulnerability researchers at the moment. They were at the number one spot 2-3 years ago.
When a vulnerability is found in the implementation, the missing controls become a problem. Your quote about 0days is certainly correct. At some point it won’t be an 0day anymore though, and it’s hard to convince people to rummage through their hard drive to delete some files.
Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately
#348Cool 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 i…
What level of confidence is there that all this API will work exactly as it works now after 30 years? I am concerned that they might at the very least deprecate and remove the ciphers used to encrypt my data in portable secret. Worse what if they remove support for the API? Then I am going to have HTML files with data I cannot decrypt anymore, right?
Web APIs are far more stable and reliable than you're giving them credit for. Do you have reason to believe that this API will break?
No points will be awarded for citing jank that is a direct consequence of depending on proprietary, experimental, or non-standard stuff (like, "well, my Flash site worked in 2002, but now it doesn't").
Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately
#349Awesome because I have a good question. How is this different than the “TMWSD” (this message will self destruct”.
Seems very highly similar. But how are they different?
Re: Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately
#350Hi, I don’t know if this question posted because it asked me to make a stupid account. But I do have a really good question.
How is this different from “TMWSD”. (This message will self-destruct.)
How are they different? Seriously they seem to have the same features but obviously if someone else created this. The. there has to be a difference, so what is the difference between these two??