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Assume your devices are compromised

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Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#121

Post by [deleted] »

eternityforest wrote: post #59
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…

My plan is just printed backup recovery codes for things that need 2FA, written master passwords, and normal hard disk backups. The extra hidden part of the plan is that I try to avoid things that aren't tracable to a trusted human help desk. Anything that involves the words "manage your own private key" is a point of failure that needs a lot of care.

[deleted]

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#122

Post by vladvasiliu »

walterbell wrote: post #12
gz5 wrote: post #8

Add network isolation to your defense in depth strategy. Close all link listeners and inbound firewall ports. Open authorized-only, outbound-only, ephemeral sessions.

DNS and HTTPS are wide-open ports. Would be nice to have a subscription service that maps popular web services to known-good destination IP address ranges for firewall rules. Is Suricata a good option for network intrusion detection?

You can somewhat mitigate that with something like LittleSnitch (macOS) / OpenSnitch (Linux). I', quite sure I've heard of something similar on Windows, but I can't recall what it was. But I think that the included Windows Firewall is able to do per-application filtering, although I don't know if it's dynamic.

The main advantage over a classic "filter firewall" is that it's able to work at the app level.

Forbidding outgoing HTTPS traffic is going to be painful if you regularly use a browser. But that doesn't mean random_local_only.app should be able to reach anything on the internet.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#123

Post by vladvasiliu »

megous wrote: post #42
smitty1e wrote: post #20

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.

I run the browser under different OS user accounts, and make my display manager display the user account in the window title bar. https://megous.com/dl/tmp/8eaa15e187fa9a2e.png (ff1 being the user) I trust it more than browser's internal isolation solutions, like tab containers, which I like to use for other things, like testing web apps using different login sessions at once. I'd hate a remote solution. ;) Though th…

Huh, I guess that, combined with a reasonable umask, would be a neat idea.

Does drag and drop work between windows owned by different users?

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#124

Post by fsflover »

hedora wrote: post #56
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…

Does per-application isolation actually stop local privilege isolation in practice on any popular operating system? Even hypervisors routinely have security issues. How often does qubes sandbox get broken by a zero day?

> How often does qubes sandbox get broken by a zero day?

Last time the hardware virtualization (which Qubes uses) was broken was in 2006, and it was done by the Qubes founder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_(software).

See also: https://www.qubes-os.org/security/xsa/.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#125

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#126

Post by eternityforest »

Hackbraten wrote: post #68
eternityforest wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, just don't install viruses. On Linux I'm sure some AppArmor or flatpak whatever will be the norm one day, once all the kinks are worked out... but for now it seems to work surprisingly well to just not install stuff that isn't popular and trusted.

Maintainers of popular, trusted projects can get compromised. Hackers steal their publishing tokens and then publish a new, malicious version.

It's not perfect, but it's still pretty good. Plus, if you update manually every few days and read tech news all the time, most malware will probably be discovered before you get it.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#127

Post by movedx »

If I assumed all my devices are compromised, I would be getting no work done and instead would simply be formatting the devices over and over.

If you come to the conclusion that a device is compromised, the device should be wiped clean, if possible, or binned if not.

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#129

Post by 42365767567 »

CameronNemo wrote: post #27
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…

If you forgot your password manager master password? Short of brain damage, I don't think that would ever happen. It would be a hassle for my family if I died, though. I'm young, but I should still get that scenario worked out.

I actually forgot my master password last year - luckily I had my partner's 1Password set as a recovery. About 3 weeks later I remembered it

Re: Assume your devices are compromised

#130

Post by KronisLV »

CameronNemo wrote: post #27
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…

If you forgot your password manager master password? Short of brain damage, I don't think that would ever happen. It would be a hassle for my family if I died, though. I'm young, but I should still get that scenario worked out.

> Short of brain damage, I don't think that would ever happen.

I once forgot my phone's unlock pattern. The very same that i had used for years, daily. I'm not someone that normally has memory problems, but i guess a few synapses just refused to do their job for some reason. I actually had an ex tell it to me, otherwise the phone would be bricked (i tried recalling it for basically 2-3 days). Now i have it and the master password for my password database written down and given to a person that i trust.

Kind of a silly and a worrying situation, so it helps to have contingencies for even cases like that. One might worry about Alzheimer's and whatnot after a situation like that, but even healthy "HDDs" occasionally get "bad sectors". Of course, there have also been cases where i forget something that was almost a subconscious memory (e.g. muscle memory) just to remember it a while later.

For context: am in the 20-30 age bracket, no other memory problems or a history of memory problems in my family tree.

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