71–80 of 222 posts
How ethical are you really? Could you actually resist that temptation? Do you think all your co-workers could too?
What a fiasco.
As the tweet points out the bad practice and doesn't comment on the good practice how _should_ one store their keys? Specifically the tweet states that using a secret manager or password vault is a problem, so what is the solution?
It is fantastic that a company operating with such horrific practices is dead. While we are at it, when can we fix similar issues below with mainstream financial systems that millions of people are still using? - Social security numbers are used as a secret for identification, despite being in plaintext and having so low entropy as to be guessable, and originally issued on a card literally saying "Not for Identificat…
The same principle (i.e. knowing an account number means being able to debit it) works surprisingly well in many European countries for direct debits, and the account number is considered even less of a secret than it is in the US. For example, many freelances routinely print it on their invoices sent out to clients, have it as part of their e-mail signature, or even prominently feature it on their website.
What makes it work is that, under the SEPA Direct Debit framework, the risk of fraud and insufficient funds is 100% on the party initiating the direct debit. An accountholder can literally click a button on their bank's app or website and they get the funds back immediately, no questions asked, within 8 weeks of the original debit date.
This, in turn, means that it is in the initiating party's self-interest to only accept this form of payment in high-trust situations, and not just like a low-fee replacement for credit and debit cards that shifts some amount of fraud risk to the accountholder or their bank.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both are bad. Crime is bad, but this is an argument for making software engineering more like a medical doctor's guild. Some things simply should not be done. There is an expectation of competence for some things like finance and medicine.
Their finance scheme was like benefits fraud. Plaintext keys is malpractice. Is that close to what you mean?
It is fantastic that a company operating with such horrific practices is dead. While we are at it, when can we fix similar issues below with mainstream financial systems that millions of people are still using? - Social security numbers are used as a secret for identification, despite being in plaintext and having so low entropy as to be guessable, and originally issued on a card literally saying "Not for Identificat…
As the tweet points out the bad practice and doesn't comment on the good practice how _should_ one store their keys? Specifically the tweet states that using a secret manager or password vault is a problem, so what is the solution?
But if you're an exchange handling billions of dollars of customer assets, the requirements should probably be higher. The text implies that many employees at the company had access to the password vault, for example. Also, shared password vaults that I've seen tend to have functionality like the ability to share a password externally (something you probably don't want!), relatively low logging abilities (while it would probably be a good idea to track each and every time a crypto key was accessed and who acccesed it), etc.
At least that's my guess at what they meant — perhaps someone had deeper knowledge and can share that.
It is fantastic that a company operating with such horrific practices is dead. While we are at it, when can we fix similar issues below with mainstream financial systems that millions of people are still using? - Social security numbers are used as a secret for identification, despite being in plaintext and having so low entropy as to be guessable, and originally issued on a card literally saying "Not for Identificat…
Traditional banking is sufficiently slow enough that things can be reversed before permanently settled. The "slow" speed of moving money is a feature. It's designed for humans who make mistakes all the time.
We also don't even need to change this aspect of traditional banking in order to add strong asymmetric encryption in front of the system. That would nip most fraud in the bud, and if nothing else save a lot of effort that goes into fraud schemes, prevention, and reversal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thinks about crypto as a clownworld only until one had to work with or inside the real financial system. Techincally, it is in no way better than crypto. The only difference is that in real financial system there is a strong legal cover for all the technical and security fuckups. Like, stealing from bank by exploiting their 10-years old Windows XP ATM connected to the internet is 10-years-in-jail offence, while s…
My impression is that there is a lot more auditing going on in the conventional financial system. Not to say that it's not bad, but there are at least some (legit) outside eyeballs on your system.
(I've worked at startups and we did better. No access to the cloud provider without a time-based escalation. Secrets in secrets managers. Passwords rotated regularly. Mandatory 2FA. Signed commits. But it would probably still look god-awful if we were a finance company!)