Cursed

Jesus, I thought this comment was a joke before reading the article

I imagine the low level form of each model being free indefinitely, possibly ad supported. It’s already probably becoming the most consistent “we’re pretty sure this is from a human” training data they have.

“Difficult to recover from” was referencing setting all of your accounts back up. I should have also included “lost” and “broken” to make that more obvious. Many hardware (most? all?) passkeys do not allow for backup and restore.

But I do see an issue with stolen hardware passkeys being used for access too if they’re a primary factor. With the mitigations you mentioned hopefully holding up.

They will almost certainly lead to vendor lock in. Why do you think they won’t? Apple’s password manager is definitely an example of vendor lock in. Many others have a simple to use export feature to CSV or something that others can understand

Edit: it could be that you don’t know what the WebAuthn/FIDO2 specification says or we understand it differently? Do you know how the attestation mechanism works? That ties the key to a device or software authenticator (the software authenticator is likely going to tie it to the device somehow, possibly even via a TEE).

There is no full stop there… A password that is sufficiently long will never be cracked no matter the hashing algorithm in use. Passwords are easily transferrable and can be communicated to a third party in the event of an emergency. They also provide tunable security, where you can trade off security for convenience if you want.

Some (not all, I know) passkeys are tied to a device. Stolen device means stolen passkey, and it’s potentially very difficult to recover from that. Passkeys are also locked to a certain standard, passwords have no such restrictions.

Tbh I don’t understand the move for passkeys replacing passwords. They should become the second factor when a user wants additional security. They’re perfect for that niche.

I once again cannot disagree more strongly. This is the BS that has been pushed by the mobile phone world. It couldn’t be more wrong. Well designed root access to your own device would dramatically increase its security for those who chose to use it.

Here are a few things you simply cannot do on a phone and would be considered terrible in any other context:

• Control system, root level services running on your device. The idea that you can’t do this is a security nightmare. It is the single most basic security tenant I can think of that is grossly violated. You have no control over your device’s attack surface
• Control privileged non-root applications
• Control network traffic. You have no low level control over your device’s firewall without root. You want egress rules? Sorry.
• Linux namespaces. You literally are banned from accessing the single greatest Linux security feature since UIDs and GIDs. Network namespace isolation? You can’t do it. UID remapping? Nah. Mount namespaces? Nope.
• SELinux policy. Android relies heavily on SELinux and you have no control over it at all.
• Device handling. There was a great root exploit a long time ago with just a plugged in USB that would have never existed on devices that sanely disabled automounting.

There is so much more. I can’t even imagine calling a device I had no root access to “secure” in a personal threat model. Business? Sure. Personal? God no. Not even close.

This is in addition to the privacy benefits.

Are you using those in the US? When I needed to get a new phone they still weren’t available here, but I’m hoping that has changed or changes by the time I need a new one again

But “give up a bit on security” doesnt preserve privacy that’s the whole thing.

I gotta disagree with this. GrapheneOS has bought into the crappy smart phone threat model, but the most obvious way to preserve my privacy is to give me complete control over my device and let me tailor it as I see fit. This means root. GrapheneOS doesn’t allow root access and that’s horrible for privacy.

Sent from my GrapheneOS phone

https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guidelines not even standard reverse engineering either. It’s incredibly impressive

I’ve used Fedora for ages and it has never forced a reboot.

Would you prefer a long winded explanation of which services need to be restart and what it means that your kernel version was updated along with a description of kexec and when/how to use it? I think it makes more sense to recommend a reboot and let people who know those lower level details do as they please.

Logging in as the root user hasn’t been the way to “be root” on Linux systems in decades. sudo/doas/whatever are there for that purpose and you can use those to set a root password if you want. This isn’t ironic at all and you have full control of your system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86_(term) and Trump is the 47th president

Lol, ok, fair.

I guess I see a lot of wiggle room in the marketing speak of their page and I haven’t actually “looked in to” Proton Mail’s claims in a loooong time. So I guess what I really wanted to say is that it’s interesting to me that people take that marketing at face value if they’re actually trying to maintain secrecy. I’ve always just taken it as a given that third party services aren’t particularly good at that, especially as they grow in complexity like Proton has. Signal has been easier for me to believe because of the singular focus and the reputation of the founder in the crypto community; although I guess he’s long gone.

It’s interesting what people expect of Proton Mail. I’ve used it for a long time but for only one reason really: their revenue stream is my subscription and not ads. I’ve never even given a second thought to all their encryption claims. Even with Proton Mail if I ever wanted to send a “secret” email I’d wrap the content in my own personal keys.

With respect to IP addresses of email logins, I’m surprised they ever claimed they don’t have logs. You’ve always been able to review the IP of a login through the web UI as far as I remember. Was the idea that that was also supposed to be encrypted?

Personally I’m OK with them complying with court orders, but I understand that “the definition of criminal is state defined” and that poses serious issues. It kinda seems like if you want to do something that could be considered criminal at some point in your life by your country you should consider something other than a 3rd party email provider for those messages. Signal would be a step up in that regard if you still wanted to use a third party.

I don’t follow CVEs: when was the last time a remotely exploitable kernel bug was a concern? Ignoring the fact that this is a home server and they likely care about uptime a lot more than exploitation on their LAN.

Generally I expect kernel bugs to be LPEs so updating user space would probably be sufficient for most home servers

The difficulty of black box over white box is the reason obscurity has benefits…

only using my own code

You’re going to write your kernel and bootloader as well? Drivers for the hardware? And a compiler for those? And an assembler to build that bootstrap compiler? Build the CPU? The second any of these are “out of your control” you lose “absolute security”. The reason people say there is no “absolute security” is that it is not a useful concept to even consider. Since you have to approach it theoretically, you can easily end up stuck at the fact that every computation changes the state of the world and thus every computation can in some way be measured. It’s a useless endeavor even if it were theoretically possible because it leads you to absurd solutions against absurdly powerful attackers. You want security in a well defined threat model not some “absolute”.

Air gapping isn’t sufficient to prevent communication either. For example there are functional TCP stacks working over audio. Silence on the Wire is quite old at this point, but also explores esoteric exfiltration methods.

People like to think in black and white, but you’re definitely right. Having your SSH server on port 36271 will likely stop a ton of drive by attacks because they simply won’t check it. Having it only listen on IP6 would stop almost all of them because you can’t trawl the IP6 space efficiently. These are “obscurity”, but they have real benefits. The idea that “obscurity” doesn’t help is just a meme that people love to quote because it’s a great single sentence with some nice rhyming “security by obscurity”. I assume the reason it became a meme is because tons of products fully relied on obscurity; I still see it all the time. As you said, it’s all layers.