151–160 of 227 posts
For some things I trust a paper backup in a fireproof safe over some nebulous cloud thingy on my phone.
Atleast everything is open source, I'll favorite it and check back some time in the future.
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Unrooted Android and iOS are much more secure than Windows or common UNIX variants. Mac OS X has similar sandboxing, but few people only use sandboxed apps. I guess the same can be true for Windows with store apps
I don't think OS X's sandboxing has seen nearly as much scrutiny as the iOS/Android counterparts. An OS X sandbox escape buys you barely anything since the vast majority of apps don't come form the Mac App Store and don't bother enabling it. I wouldn't put a whole lot of faith in it.
Hey HN! We've built a way to generate an SSH key on your phone and use it from your computer such that the private key never leaves the phone. We were inspired by the threat model of USB HSMs like the Yubikey and set out to build a free, public source, and easier to use BYOD alternative. Looking forward to your questions!
The Yubikey (as in generate and store SSH keys on the Yubikey) is not exactly a hard to use option. It's not as nicely packaged, but quite functional. EDIT: I'd love to talk about this, if someone has a differing opinion. Once set up, it was dirt simple to use.
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What's cheaper - an iOS phone, or an Android phone + a Yubikey?
Tptacek is telling you that the most secure phone is iOS. If what's most important to you is price (and, therefore not security), yeah, you might find something else to be more compelling. That fact your different value system leads to a different choice has no relevance to the discussion. If your assumption is that Android + yubikey is as good as iOS, you need to state that. Tptacek disagrees with that elsewhere in…
In terms of possible compromise, I rate the possibility that my phone is compromised way higher than my laptop. Adding a factor is a good idea in terms of security (not in terms of availability and ease of use, but definitely in security), but replacing it entirely... No. Why'd I even want to remove id_rsa? What's the problem being solved here?
The problem is that your private key stored in ~/.ssh/id_rsa can be read by any user-level application. The private key is even vulnerable if you passphrase encrypt it. See our deep dive into the threat model: https://blog.krypt.co/why-store-an-ssh-key-with-kryptonite-9... This is why we move it off the computer and onto a phone. The security is comparable to using a Yubikey. I'm not sure why you say your phone is le…
Furthermore, it is nowadays largely trivial to set up sandboxing within a single user (using SELinux, Apparmor or whatever else) or to use multiple users and classical privilege separation to achieve the same effect.
It is also telling that your "Threat Models" in the link above do not discuss attacks against the phone at all.
Edit to add: You currently also do not have the ability to use my keys. If I were to install the app (and set it to auto-update as suggest so vigorously elsewhere), all it takes is for a tiny little update by you with no public oversight to own every server I have access to. How is that possibly improving security?!
In terms of possible compromise, I rate the possibility that my phone is compromised way higher than my laptop. Adding a factor is a good idea in terms of security (not in terms of availability and ease of use, but definitely in security), but replacing it entirely... No. Why'd I even want to remove id_rsa? What's the problem being solved here?
The problem is that your private key stored in ~/.ssh/id_rsa can be read by any user-level application. The private key is even vulnerable if you passphrase encrypt it. See our deep dive into the threat model: https://blog.krypt.co/why-store-an-ssh-key-with-kryptonite-9... This is why we move it off the computer and onto a phone. The security is comparable to using a Yubikey. I'm not sure why you say your phone is le…
A phone is much more prone to theft and I don't password protect it because if I'd have to input a 10+ character random password every time... I might as well not have a smartphone but just pull out my laptop every time. Since I carry it around all the time, there is little opportunity for unauthorized access...until it gets stolen. And then I don't want to lose all access to my infrastructure.
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The point is, even when krd is compromised, the malicious party cannot gain access to your private key. They key is only stored on your phone and you have to physically confirm the login from your phone.
Is the private key still worth something if the attacker has access to the server?
It sounds very hipster and all, but how is a phone more trustworthy than a Linux PC? Cool, we don't need to trust a PC, now we have to trust a phone and pretend that malware for smartphones don't exist at all. Hardware USB token looks much better as its attack surface is so much smaller than iOS/Android.
* Every application on the phone is sandboxed. * The disk is encrypted by default, and the OS is aggressive about keeping it encrypted ; a booted-up computer is almost always decrypted. * The language runtimes on the phone are hardened. * The phone's kernel, in addition to being more important attack surface than the Linux kernel (because of the jailbreak market, among other things), is auto-updated. * The phone's us…
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/replicant-developers-fin...
It's a real pain, but I can buy a laptop/desktop that doesn't have Intel ME (or its AMD equivalent) running on it. But there's no such thing as a working phone without a baseband OS. And AFAICT there isn't a single available baseband OS running FLOSS, even including the zerophone.
In fact, there isn't even a phone that has a physical hardware switch that allows the user to turn off the baseband.
edit: clarification of "Intel ME"
But I wish people would be aware of smartcards more, they are all around us, but sort of invisible and unnoticed.
1. But cheap blank "Java" smartcards, more or less disposable
2. Install this applet on it https://github.com/philipWendland/IsoApplet
3. Works with OpenSC