21–30 of 73 posts
This is very relevant because decentralized means that all that centralized storage and bandwidth needs to split up and amplified to account for offline users.
The essay I wish she had written would have said, "we don't need more 'secure messaging systems' -- we should be making all the following tools secure by design" For example, (and whether you love them or hate them) Apple takes this seriously: your fingerprints don't leave the device and are implemented by a piece of hardware in such a way that even Apple doesn't have access to them. Compare that to the Android imple…
What? Google CTS demands that devices store fingerprints in TEE and they never can touch filesystem. Where did you get the idea that fingerprints are stored on a filesystem?! O.o (Android Fingerprint HAL document: https://source.android.com/security/authentication/fingerpri... ) (Note that the document allows storing fingerprints on FS, but they must be additionally encrypted. Better devices do not do that.)
The need for a trusted path has been well understood since the 1960s at least (and its roots run back through the "break" key on the teletype); it's reflected in the rainbow books and of course in the design of Multics. Plenty of people at Google understand this well; some of them even participated in writing those rainbow books!
You can ship a device without passing CTS and it is very common (though TBF, things like my Mavic drone don't have a thumbprint sensor).
And just a few months ago, HTC shipped a phone with unencrypted fingerprints: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/10/htc-finge...
Again, I'm not holding Apple up as some paragon, it was simply the example I used to point out the importance of security design at depth, defense at depth, and integration into all aspects of a system.
I totally agree with this guy, but who is he in the industry? Someone famous for something? Just curious.
Just use Keybase!
The essay I wish she had written would have said, "we don't need more 'secure messaging systems' -- we should be making all the following tools secure by design" For example, (and whether you love them or hate them) Apple takes this seriously: your fingerprints don't leave the device and are implemented by a piece of hardware in such a way that even Apple doesn't have access to them. Compare that to the Android imple…
> your fingerprints don't leave the device and are implemented by a piece of hardware in such a way that even Apple doesn't have access to them.
This is true for Google, too.
> Compare that to the Android implementations which have fingerprints in the filesystem.
They're not stored in plaintext. They're encrypted with keys that remain in hardware. You can never read the keys, only encrypt files with them, from applications running in a separate physical address space, accessible only through the hypervisor.
This may not be as elegant as doing matching on the sensor, but keep in mind we have to play within the constraints of 2 difference vendors (SoC, Fingerprint Sensor).
Implying that Android is somehow less secure in the case of fingerprint is disingenuous.
Just use Keybase!
I can't help but get an embrace, extend, extinguish vibe from keybase. It was a nifty key discovery service initially, but more and more feels like a closed platform, and gives me a sense of deja vu akin to XMPP on GTalk.