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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • The third option is to use the native secret vault. MacOS has its Keychain, Windows has DPAPI, Linux has has non-standardized options available depending on your distro and setup.

    Full disk encryption does not help you against data exfil, it only helps if an attacker gains physical access to your drive without your decryption key (e.g. stolen device or attempt to access it without your presence).

    Even assuming that your device is compromised by an attacker, using safer storage mechanisms at least gives you time to react to the attack.




  • Kinda expected the SSH key argument. The difference is the average user group.

    The average dude with a SSH key that’s used for more than their RPi knows a bit about security, encryption and opsec. They would have a passphrase and/or hardening mechanisms for their system and network in place. They know their risks and potential attack vectors.

    The average dude who downloads a desktop app for a messenger that advertises to be secure and E2EE encrypted probably won’t assume that any process might just wire tap their whole “encrypted” communications.

    Let’s not forget that the threat model has changed by a lot in the last years, and a lot of effort went into providing additional security measures and best practices. Using a secure credential store, additional encryption and not storing plaintext secrets are a few simple ones of those. And sure, on Linux the SSH key is still a plaintext file. But it’s a deliberate decision of you to keep it as plaintext. You can at least encrypt with a passphrase. You can use the actual working file permission model of Linux and SSH will refuse to use your key with loose permissions. You would do the same on Windows and Mac and use a credential store and an agent to securely store and use your keys.

    Just because your SSH key is a plaintext file and the presumption of a secure home dir, you still wouldn’t do a ~/passwords.txt.


  • How in the fuck are people actually defending signal for this, and with stupid arguments such as windows is compromised out of the box?

    You. Don’t. Store. Secrets. In. Plaintext.

    There is no circumstance where an app should store its secrets in plaintext, and there is no secret which should be stored in plaintext. Especially since this is not some random dudes random project, but a messenger claiming to be secure.

    Edit: “If you got malware then this is a problem anyway and not only for signal” - no, because if secure means to store secrets are used, than they are encrypted or not easily accessible to the malware, and require way more resources to obtain. In this case, someone would only need to start a process on your machine. No further exploits, no malicious signatures, no privilege escalations.

    “you need device access to exploit this” - There is no exploiting, just reading a file.


  • These were casual, mutual conversations that sometimes leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate, but nothing more. Nothing illegal happened, no pictures were shared, no crimes were committed, I never even met the individual. […] That’s on me as an adult, a husband and a father.

    Jesus fucking christ. If you, as a father, are “leaning too much in the direction of being inappropriate” with a minor, you’re a fucking pedophile. There is nothing to discuss that’s leaning into being inappropriate with a minor, except if you’re a pedophile. Trying to make it sound less of an issue just because there weren’t pictures sent, is a pathetic attempt of an excuse for being a pedophile.

    For being so real and no filter, there’s a fucking lot of sugarcoating for admitting the fact that he sexted with a minor.

    I specifically don’t get how you can do that as a father, and even being the complete asshole that he is, not even once thinking that the victim could be his own child. I really wonder what he would say about such a tweet in this case.

    Absolutely fucking disgusting.