loudwhisper

joined 1 year ago
[–] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 5 points 2 months ago

The biggest items on the graph are all out of bounds accesses, use-after-free and overflows. It is undeniable that memory safe languages help reducing vulnerabilities, we know for decades that memory corruption vulnerabilities are both the most common and the most severe in programs written in memory-unsafe languages.

Unsafe rust is also not turning off every safety feature, and it's much better to have clear highlighted and isolated parts of code that are unsafe, which can be more easily reviewed and tested, compared to everything suffering from those problems.

I don't think there is debate here, rewriting is a huge effort, but the fact that using C is prone to memory corruption vulnerabilities and memory-safe languages are better from that regard is a fact.

[–] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 2 points 2 months ago

Sorry about that :) But you get the credit for spotting the problem! Thanks for that!

[–] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Thanks, I have taken @sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works's suggestion and I have added "create".

[–] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

With Simplelogin integration Proton does PGP encryption because effectively all emails are forwarded by a simplelogin address. I have just tested to be sure, and I can confirm it is the case. I agree though that this only protects "my side", which is why I said that it doesn't provide all the PGP features.

Publishing your PGP public key next to your email doesn’t require “wasting a domain” or anything like that

It does if I don't have any key that I use for emails. My key(s) is bound to the Proton account with the other domains I use, so for this domain I would need to either add it (back) to Proton (easier option, but "wastes" a domain) or just generate and manage a key myself, that I can then even add manually to Proton, but I didn't bother doing this just yet. I am not going to use any other public key I have because I wanted specifically to keep this domain separated from my identity.

I just thought it was amusing that you didn’t seem to actually follow your own advice.

FWIW, I do follow the described setup for everything personal, which is what matters to me. As I said, ~1/2 months ago I did have my PGP key because I enrolled the domain into Proton, which if anything is a testament to how annoying it is having to manage keys myself (which I already do for signing commits etc.). Maybe I will spend some time to polish the setup, eventually.

[–] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 2 points 2 months ago (7 children)

I don't think so, does it sound weird? Not a native speaker, so maybe it does :)

[–] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 1 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Yep, I am aware of the contradiction. I used to, but since then I moved to an alias as it was not worth wasting a domain for a single address. I may spend eventually the time to setup PGP for the alias itself, but I just didn't. It's a Proton alias, so I get anyway PGP encryption, though (obviously without all the features, but good enough for the near-zero volume I currently have).

 

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/16642151

(I have just learned you can cross-post!)

As someone who has read plenty of discussions about email security (some of them in this very community), including all kind of stuff (from the company groupie to tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories), I have decided to put ~~too many hours~~ some time to discuss the different threat models for email setups, including the basic most people have, the "secure email provider" one (e.g., Protonmail) and the "I use ~~arch~~ PGP manually BTW".

Jokes aside, I hope that it provides an overview comprehensive and - I don't want to say objective, but at least rational - enough so that everyone can draw their own conclusion, while also showing how certain "radical" arguments that I have seen in the past are relatively shortsighted.

The tl;dr is that email is generally not a great solution when talking about security. Depending on your risk profile, using a secure email provider may be the best compromise between realistic security and usability, while if you really have serious security needs, you probably shouldn't use emails, but if you do then a custom setup is your best choice.

Cheers

[–] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 3 points 2 months ago

Not that I know, which is the reason why I essentially didn't consider those threats relevant for my personal threat model. However, it's also possible it happened and it was never discovered. The point is that there are risks associated with having the same provider having access to both the emails (and the operations around them) and the keys/crypto operations.

The cost of stealthily compromising a secure email company is simply disproportionate compared to the gain from accessing my emails. Likewise, it's unrealistic to think some sophisticated attacker would target me specifically to the point that they will discover and then compromise the specific tooling I am using to access/encrypt/decrypt emails. Also, a $5 wrench could probably achieve the same goal in a quicker and cheaper way.

If I were a Snowden-level person, I would probably consider that though, as it's possible that the US government would try to coerce -say- Proton in serving bad JS code to user X. For most people I argue these are theoretical attacks that do not pose concrete risk.

[–] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 2 points 2 months ago

Thanks, I will go and double check, I am sure there are more typos!

I honestly didn't think at all about the use of checkmarks/crosses and the fact that it can be misinterpreted, I will add a disclaimer.

A bigger issue IMO is how you describe email encryption in transit as a matter of fact, but according to Google transparency report[1] there are still domains that do not support in transit encryption, and, what’s worse, when you send an email you can’t tell if it will be encrypted or not.

you are right. The reason why I took that for granted is because I assumed the scenario in which people use the "mainstream" providers. I was looking at data and I think Outlook and Gmail alone make up more than 50% of the market share. I made an assumption which I considered fair, as 99%+ of the users do not need to worry about this at all. However, this is interesting data and I might add a note about it as well, so thanks!

[–] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Thanks!

Can you make the images clickable? They’re impossible to read at that size.

I will look into it, there might be a zola option for it. If there is, sure!

This paragraph should probably mention that this won’t work if the provider uses E2EE

That paragraph is in the context of what I call "transparent encryption", which means E2EE works until the provider is not compromised and the E2EE is effectively broken by delivering malicious software or disclosing the key. E2EE is as resilient as the security of the provider, which is why picking a trusted one is important. Of course, compromising the provider and breaking the E2EE is quite complex.

[–] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 2 points 2 months ago

Thanks a lot! Hopefully at least someone finds it helpful!

 

As someone who has read plenty of discussions about email security (some of them in this very community), including all kind of stuff (from the company groupie to tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories), I have decided to put ~~too many hours~~ some time to discuss the different threat models for email setups, including the basic most people have, the "secure email provider" one (e.g., Protonmail) and the "I use ~~arch~~ PGP manually BTW".

Jokes aside, I hope that it provides an overview comprehensive and - I don't want to say objective, but at least rational - enough so that everyone can draw their own conclusion, while also showing how certain "radical" arguments that I have seen in the past are relatively shortsighted.

The tl;dr is that email is generally not a great solution when talking about security. Depending on your risk profile, using a secure email provider may be the best compromise between realistic security and usability, while if you really have serious security needs, you probably shouldn't use emails, but if you do then a custom setup is your best choice.

Cheers

[–] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 1 points 3 months ago

Django Unchained

Isn't it ironic that a movie with so many uses of that word helped you understand that word better?

To me it seems a very good reason to believe that people shouldn't be afraid of the syntax of the word, but definitely oppose the use when the semantic is the despicable one.

[–] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 21 points 3 months ago

I think the benefits of federation is discoverability. I can spin up my gitea or forgejo (or something else!) Instance, but when people look for code in their instances, they can still discover my public repositories, and if they want to contribute, they can fork and open PRs from their instances.

So yeah, it means mostly you can selfhost and provide space to others, but with the same benefits that right now github offers (I.e., everything is there).

 

Hi, recently (ironically, right after sharing some of my posts here on Lemmy) I had a higher (than usual, not high in general) number of "attacks" to my website (I am talking about dumb bots, vulnerability scanners and similar stuff). While all of these are not really critical for my site (which is static and minimal), I decided to take some time and implement some generic measures using (mostly) Crowdsec (fail2ban alternative?) and I made a post about that to help someone who might be in a similar situation.

The whole thing is basic, in the sense that is just a way to reduce noise and filter out the simplest attacks, which is what I argue most of people hosting websites should be mostly concerned with.

 

GoDaddy really lived up to its bad reputation and recently changed their API rules. The rules are simple: either you own 10 (or 50) domains, you pay $20/month, or you don't get the API. I personally didn't get any communication, and this broke my DDNS setup. I am clearly not the only one judging from what I found online. A company this big gating an API behind such a steep price... So I will repeat what many people said before me (being right): don't. use. GoDaddy.

 

I hope this won't be counted as some form of self-promotion, even though I am sharing a post from my own blog.

As a tech worker who works in a Cloud shop, I wanted to elaborate the many reasons why I find working with Clouds terrible, from multiple points of view.

I tried to organize my thoughts in a (relatively long) post, in which both technical aspects and political aspects (which are very related) are covered.

I am sure many people will have different perspectives, and this could be potentially also a nice prompt for a discussion.

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