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Assume your devices are compromised
141–150 of 197 posts
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#142My home drive is constantly churning and I have no idea what is going on. And there are a lot of software in there, every apt update is a risk that some new supply chain attack is on the way.
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#143Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you using for a deadman switch?
The system I'd trust most is to have 2 attorneys given sealed envelopes with instructions to give them to your wife on your death. One attorney is given an envelope with the passwords to your accounts (or to your password manager) encrypted with a one time pad. The other attorney is given an envelope with the key to it. Each envelope includes instructions to decrypt. If you're giving her a password to a password mana…
And for those of us who aren't wealthy enough to have two different attorneys on retainer, giving your spouse the encrypted password store along with the key to a safety deposit box containing the decryption key would have to do.
Personally, my wife would wonder why I'm going to so much trouble to keep my passwords secret from her until I die; but then my personal password store is for services we share like banking, and any passwords she doesn't know are benign things like my email addresses and various website logins that wouldn't matter anyway when I die. Of course I also have my work passwords (I'm the IT manager), but my supervisor and the company owner each have a secured store of all of my work passwords as well, plus the master password to access them, in the event something happens to me (or I'm just on vacation for a week and temporarily unreachable when access is needed).
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#145Bought a desktop recently. Thought about setting up verified boot and disk encryption, but... [M]y biggest takeaway was that all of this was quite complicated and did not really have anything to do with what I bought this system for. So I decided to throw in the towel and flip SecureBoot off. (See last section here, on trust): https://cameronnemo.gitlab.io/posts/lagomorpha/
SecureBoot was as much an attempt by Microsoft to put in place a method to lock out other OSes as it was for local physical security. Most consumer desktop and laptop computer users don't password protect their BIOS/EFI, so an attacker with physical access can simply turn off SecureBoot themselves and then boot whatever toolkit they want to take over the system.
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#146Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
The system I'd trust most is to have 2 attorneys given sealed envelopes with instructions to give them to your wife on your death. One attorney is given an envelope with the passwords to your accounts (or to your password manager) encrypted with a one time pad. The other attorney is given an envelope with the key to it. Each envelope includes instructions to decrypt. If you're giving her a password to a password mana…
And for those of us who aren't wealthy enough to have two different attorneys on retainer, giving your spouse the encrypted password store along with the key to a safety deposit box containing the decryption key would have to do. Personally, my wife would wonder why I'm going to so much trouble to keep my passwords secret from her until I die; but then my personal password store is for services we share like banking,…
This is more of a thought experiment, but would also serve as a decent backup in case of natural disaster, house burning down, etc. As for safety deposit boxes, those can be closed out for nonpayment, bank branches will shut down, etc. Not the best hands off long term solution. An attorney will let you know if there's an issue because it's their ass on the line if they don't.
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#148These 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.
> 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.
How do you handle your password manager (assuming you use one)?
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#149These 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…
For sure. I first focused on setting up a homelab and de-googling my phone and whatnot for privacy reasons, but it's nearly impossible to not be spied on. You can certainly reduce it. In the end I'm still doing this for data sovereignty more than for privacy now, but I don't mind the boost in (imperfect) privacy.
Well, you gain privacy from corporations. You have to keep your software up-to-date, though, or you risk losing privacy to hackers.
Re: Assume your devices are compromised
#150The 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…
> 2) Utilize some container runtime to provide isolation for legacy applications and stub out features such as filesystem calls so they do not to be aware of its existence.
I've been thinking about doing this on my laptop at work. With a bit of thought, it shouldn't be too hard to run for example software compilation or in fact most CLI/TUI tools using a minimal disk and network namespace using systemd or a container runtime.
Practically, this would allow me to put e.g. ever beloved NPM into a disk namespace where a ~/.ssh or even the .git of the repo it is in just doesn't exist and a network namespace in which the company VPN doesn't exist (or it just has a route for the NPM repository host). This can also be used to label the process using SELinux or apparmor as a second line of defense against and possibly after an escape of something bad.
However, time hasn't been available for this so far. And no, it wouldn't be end-user-friendly.