The backlash is extremely idiotic. The only two options are to store it in plaintext or to have the user enter the decryption key every time they open it. They opted for the more user-friendly option, and that is perfectly okay.
If you are worried about an outsider extracting it from your computer, then just use full disk encryption. If you are worried about malware, they can just keylog you when you enter the decryption key anyways.
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.
Linux has the secret service API that has been a freedesktop.org standard for 15 years.
Secret service API. Damn. That’s how FSB knows what it knows.
A better thing to be worried about IMO is that Signal contains proprietary code. Also to my knowledge nobody is publicly verifying the supposed “reproducible builds” if they even still exist.
The alternative is safeStorage, which uses the operating system’s credential management facility if available. On Mac OS and sometimes Linux, this means another process running in the user’s account is prevented from accessing it. Windows doesn’t have a protection against that, but all three systems do protect the credentials if someone copies data offline.
Signal should change this, but it isn’t a major security flaw. If an attacker can copy your home directory or run arbitrary code on your device, you’re already in big trouble.
Sure, I was aware. You have the same problem with ssh keys, gpg keys and many other things
However, you can save encrypted ssh, gpg keys and save that encryption key in the OS keyring.
Yes, but you STILL need to enter password on every reboot.
Is it possible to seamlessly integrate, so when something requests those keys you’ll get a prompt?
With SSH at least you can password protect the key itself so that you always get a prompt.
Nice, didn’t know, I’ll look into it
E2EE is not supposed to protect if device get compromised.
One could argue that Windows is compromised right out of the box.
Source:
Microsoft are integrating adware and spyware straight into the os.
Source:
It’s right there in the open. Install windows and you’ll see it. There is personalised ads in the start menu and the os is uploading your private files to the cloud automatically, taking screenshots and uploading them, etc. It’s not hidden whatsoever.
Try setup fresh windows 11 system.
I don’t understand how that would prove anything.
A lot of tracker and spyware already mention in setup. And without bypass you cannot setup without microsoft account.
source: 93% of ransomware are windows based
99% of people in France are French
BUT WHAT OF QUEBEC
Are they in france?
I mean… basically
Therefore France is french righr out of box
deleted by creator
Correlation is not causation.
Causation was never stated nor implied
“The computer” decides when to install updates and which ones to install.
Intrinsically/semantically no but the expectation is that the texts are encrypted at rest and the keys are password and/or tpm+biometric protected. That’s just how this works at this point. Also that’s the government standard for literally everything from handheld devices to satellites (yes, actually).
At this point one of the most likely threat vectors is someone just taking your shit. Things like border crossings, rubber stamped search warrants, cops raid your house because your roommate pissed them off, protests, needing to go home from work near a protest, on and on.
If your device is turned on and you are logged in, your data is no longer at rest.
Signal data will be encrypted if your disk is also encrypted.
If your device’s storage is not encrypted, and you don’t have any type of verified boot process, then thats on you, not Signal.
That’s not how this works.
If the stored data from signal is encrypted and the keys are not protected than that is the security risk that can be mitigated using common tools that every operating system provides.
You’re defending signal from a point of ignorance. This is a textbook risk just waiting for a series of latent failures to allow leaks or access to your “private” messages.
There are many ways attackers can dump files without actually having privileged access to write to or read from memory. However, that’s a moot point as neither you nor I are capable of enumerating all potential attack vectors and risks. So instead of waiting for a known failure to happen because you are personally “confident” in your level of technological omnipotence, we should instead not be so blatantly arrogant and fill the hole waiting to be used.
Also this is a common problem with framework provided solutions:
https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/api/safe-storage
This is such a common problem that it has been abstracted into apis for most major desktop frameworks. And every major operating system provides a key ring like service for this purpose.
Because this is a common hole in your security model.
Having Signal fill in gaps for what the OS should be protecting is just going to stretch Signal more than it already does. I would agree that if Signal can properly support that kind of protection on EVERY OS that its built for, go for it. But this should be an OS level protection that can be offered to Signal as an app, not the other way around.
Having Signal fill in gaps for what the OS should be protecting is just going to stretch Signal more than it already does. I would agree that if Signal can properly support that kind of protection on EVERY OS that its built for, go for it. But this should be an OS level protection that can be offered to Signal as an app, not the other way around.
Damn reading literacy has gone downhill these days.
Please reread my post.
But this should be an OS level protection that can be offered to Signal as an app, not the other way around.
- OSs provide keyring features already
- The framework signal uses (electron) has a built in API for this EXACT NEED
Cmon, you can do better than this, this is just embarrassing.
Why exactly am I re-reading your post? Im in complete agreement with you? Should I not be?
Signal data will be encrypted if your disk is also encrypted.
True.
and you don’t have any type of verified boot process
How motherboard refusing to boot from another drive would protect anything?
Its more about protecting your boot process from malware.
Well, yes. By refusing to boot. It can’t prevent booting if motherboard is replaced.
EDIT: s/do anything/prevent booting/
Thats correct. Thats one of the many perks.
EDIT: s/do anything/prevent booting/
TPM isn’t all that reliable. You will have people upgrading their pc, or windows update updating their bios, or any number of other reasons reset their tpm keys, and currently nothing will happen. In effect people would see Signal completely break and loose all their data, often seemingly for no reason.
Talking to windows or through it to the TPM also seems sketchy.
In the current state of Windows, the sensible choice is to leave hardware-based encryption to the OS in the form of disk encryption, unfortunate as it is. The great number of people who loose data or have to recover their backup disk encryption key from their Microsoft account tells how easily that system is disturbed (And that Microsoft has the decryption keys for your encrypted date).
Indeed, End-to-End Encryption protects data between those ends, not ends themselves. If ends are compromised, no math will help you.
Mfw end to end can be compromised at the end.
That said, they should fix this anyway
Plaintext should never be used in any application that deals with security, ever.
Oh no, tell that to SSH.
It doesn’t use plain text. It is end to end encrypted but that isn’t what this “issue” is
unless you’re reading ciphertext yourself, this doesn’t make sense
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.
All your session cookies are stored in plaintext.
Chrome cookies are encrypted, for exactly the reasons stated. If malware gains access to your system and compromises it in a way that DPAPI calls can be replicated in the way Chrome does it, then your sessions will also be compromised. But this is way harder to do, and at least prevents trivial data exfiltration.
You. Don’t. Store. Secrets. In. Plaintext.
SSH stores the secret keys in plaintext too. In a home dir accessible only by the owning user.
I won’t speak about Windows but on Linux and other Unix systems the presumption is that if your home dir is compromised you’re fucked anyway. Effort should be spent on actually protecting access to the home personal files not on security theater.
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.
Not true, SSH keys need their passphrase to be used. If you don’t set one, that’s on you.
Come on, 95% of users don’t set passwords on their ssh keys
Where are these stays from lmao.
Counting my friends
You can count me too
Well yes, but also how would users react if they had to type in their passphrase every time they open the app? This is also exactly what we’re giving up everywhere else by clicking ‘remember this device’.
If someone gets access they can delete your keys, or set up something that can intercept your keys in other ways.
The security of data at rest is just one piece of the puzzle. In many systems the access to the data is considered much more important than whether the data itself is encrypted in one particular scenario.
SSH has encrypted keys
If someone has access to your machine you are screwed anyway. You need to store the encryption key somewhere
Yes, in your head, and in your second factor, if possible, keeping derived secrets always encrypted at rest, decrypting at the latest possible moment and not storing (decrypted) secrets in-memory for longer than absolutely necessary at use.
You. Don’t. Store. Secrets. In. Plaintext.
Ok. Enter password at every launch.
How in the fuck are people actually defending signal for this
Probably because Android (at least) already uses file-based encryption, and the files stored by apps are not readable by other apps anyways.
And if people had to type in a password every time they started the app, they just wouldn’t use it.
Popular encrypted messaging app Signal is facing criticism over a security issue in its desktop application.
Emphasis mine.
I think the point is the developers might have just migrated the code without adjustments since that is how it was implemented before. Similar to how PC game ports sometimes run like shit since they are a close 1-1 of the original which is not always the most optimized or ideal, but the quickest to output.
Been a few days since using electron, but AFAIK electron can’t be used as a wrapper for android apps, or can it? Or is their android app a web app wrapped into a “native” android app too?
Also, since this seems to be an issue since 2018, 6 years should be plenty to rewrite using a native secure storage…
AFAIK Android encrypts entire fs with one key. And ACL is not encryption.
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Oh wow that’s quite a red flag ngl
If your system is compromised to such an extend, it really doesn’t make much difference how the keys are stored at rest.
If the keys are accessible to any process, your system doesn’t need to be compromised. All it takes is an App that you”trust” to break that trust and snatch everything up. Meta has already been caught fucking around with other social media apps on device. They even intercepted Snapchat traffic on some users devices in order to collect that data. It could be as simple as you installed WhatsApp and they went and pillaged your Signal files.
All it takes is an App that you”trust” to break that trust
I get what you’re trying to say, but that’s something I’d classify as “compromised” as well.
For sure, just suggesting that “compromised” doesn’t necessarily mean you got hacked by someone because they tricked you into giving a password, or they scraped it from another website, or you installed something sketchy. It could be as simple as Microsoft scans all your files with AI, or Meta snoops other social media (which it has been caught doing).
So you’re saying that the os itself is compromised? Gee, good luck protecting your processes from the fucking os, no matter how you do it.
But my system is not compromised?
Did you read the article?
How do you know?
Because I check my system and I don’t even use Signal?
“checking” does not prevent anything bad from happening. and if that file were read by a malicious actor, it would likely be immediate and you’d never even notice.
Did you see that I said “I don’t use Signal”?
Why? They would need access to the device
Thanks ChatGPT.
Whatever its stores and however it stores it doesn’t matter to me: I moved its storage space to my ~/.Private encrypted directory. Same thing for my browser: I don’t use a master password or rely on its encryption because I set it up so it too saves my profile in the ~/.Private directory.
See here for more information. You can essentially secure any data saved by any app with eCryptfs - at least when you’re logged out.
Linux-only of course. In Windows… well, Windows.
Or ext4 encrytion. Which is overpowered. You can have different keys for different files and directories.
That applies to pretty much all desktop apps, your browser profile can be copied to get access to all your already logged in cookie sessions for example.
IIRC this is how those Elon musk crypto livestream hacks worked on YouTube back in the day, I think the bad actors got a hold of cached session tokens and gave themselves access to whatever account they were targeting. Linus Tech Tips had a good bit in a WAN show episode
And there are ways to mitigate this attack (essentially the same as a AiTM or pass-the-cookie attacks, so look those up). Thus rendering your argument invalid.
Just because “something else might be insecure”, doesn’t in any way imply “everything else should also be insecure as well”.
It is the same concept. Once your machine is pwded you are screwed
That’s all hinges on the assumption that your computer is pwned. Which is wrong
You don’t necessarily have to have privileged access to read files or exfiltrated information.
That point doesn’t matter anyways though because you’re completely ignoring the risk here. Please Google “Swiss cheese model”. Your comment is a classic example of non-security thinking… It’s the same comment made 100x in this thread with different words
Unless you can list out all possible risks and exploits which may affect this issue, then you are not capable of making judgement calls on the risk itself.
You act as though you somehow have more knowledge than everyone else. They problem is that you don’t understand encryption and permissions. You can’t just magically make something unreadable by programs with the same permission level. If you encrypt it there will need to be a key to decrypt it. That can could conceivably be encrypted with a password but that would require someone to enter a password. If they don’t enter a password they key will be stored plain text so anyone could easily decrypt your messages. Programs running as a user have the same permissions as that user. Does that make sense? You can’t just make something selectively unreadable with the current security model. I guess you could try to implement some sort or privileged daemon but that would open up more issues than it solved.
I would have a problem if Signal claimed that the desktop messages were encrypted at rest. However, they don’t make any such claim. If you are concerned about security I would recommend running everything in virtual machines and flatpaks. This way the chances of something misbehaving in a way that causes harm is minimized.
I’m not claiming some grand level of knowledge here. I also cannot enumerate all risks. The difference is that I know that I don’t know, and the danger that poses towards cognitive biases when it comes to false confidence, and a lack of effective risk management. I’m a professional an adjacent field, mid way into pivoting into cybersecurity, I used to think the same way, that’s why I’m so passionate here. It’s painful to see arguments and thought processes counter to the fundamentals of security & safety that I’ve been learning the past few years. So, yeah, I’m gonna call it out and try and inform.
All that crap said:
And you are right, the problem gets moved. However, that’s the point, that’s how standardization works, and how it’s supposed to work. It’s a force multiplier, it smooths out the implementation. Moving the problem to the OS level means that EVERYONE benefits from advanced in Windows/Macos/Linux. Automatically.
It’s not signal’s responsibility, it shouldn’t be unless that’s a problem they specifically aim to solve. They have the tools available to them already, electron has a standardized API for this,
secureStorage. Which handles the OS interop for them.I’m not arguing that signal needs to roll their own here. The expectation is that they, at least, utilize the OS provided features made available to their software.
While it would certainly be nice to see this addressed, I don’t recall Signal ever claiming their desktop app provided encryption at rest. I would also think that anyone worried about that level of privacy would be using disappearing messages and/or regularly wiping their history.
That said, this is just one of the many reasons why whole disk encryption should be the default for all mainstream operating systems today, and why per-app permissions and storage are increasingly important too.
Full disk encryption doesn’t help with this threat model at all. A rogue program running on the same machine can still access all the files.
It does help greatly in general though, because all of your data will be encrypted when the device is at rest. Theft and B&Es will no longer present a risk to your privacy.
Per-app permissions address this specific threat model directly. Containerized apps, such as those provided by Flatpak can ensure that apps remain sandboxed and unable to access data without explicit authorization.
Exactly.
I’ll admit to being lazy and not enabling encryption on my Windows laptops. But if I deployed something for someone, it would be encrypted.
I don’t recall Signal ever claiming their desktop app provided encryption at rest.
I’m not sure if they’ve claimed that, but it does that using SQLCipher.
Does encrypting your disks change something for the end user in day to day usage? I’m honest, I’ve never used encrypted disks in my life.
Whole disk encryption wouldn’t change your daily usage, no. It just means that when you boot your PC you have to enter your passphrase. And if your device becomes unbootable for whatever reason, and you want to access your drive, you’ll just have to decrypt it first to be able to read it/write to it, e.g. if you want to rescue files from a bricked computer. But there’s no reason not to encrypt your drive. I can’t think of any downsides.
If any part of the data gets corrupted you lose the whole thing. Recovery tools can’t work with partially corrupted encrypted data.
I don’t think that’s a big deal with Signal data. You can log back into your account, you’d just lose your messages. idk how most people use Signal but I have disappearing messages on for everything anyway, and if a message is that important to you then back it up.
It depends on how you set it up. I think the default in some cases (like Windows Bitlocker) is to store the key in TPM, so everything becomes transparent to the user at that point, although many disagree with this method for privacy/security reasons.
The other method is to provide a password or keyfile during bootup, which does change something for the end user somewhat.
It’s transparent for end user basically, but protects the laptop at least when outside and if someone steals the computer. As long as it was properly shutdown.
Define properly shut down. Do your thieves usually ask first?
I think they’re just referring to an outdated concept of OSes with non-journaling filesystems that can cause data corruption if the disk is shut off abruptly, which in theory could corrupt the entire disk at once if it was encrypted at a device level. But FDE was never used in the time of such filesystems anyways.
If you suspend the laptop when moving locations instead of shutting down or hibernating to disk then disk encryption is useless.
Most operating systems will require your desktop password upon resume, and most thieves are low-functioning drug users who are not about to go Hacker Man on your laptop. They will most likely just wipe the system and install something else; if they can even figure that out.
No, the average user will never know the difference. I couldn’t tell you exactly what the current performance impact is for hardware encryption, but it’s likely around 1-4% depending on the platform (I use LUKS under Linux).
For gamers, it’s likely a 1-5 FPS loss, depending on your hardware, which is negligible in my experience. I play mostly first and third person shooter-style games at 1440p/120hz, targeting 60-90 FPS, and there’s no noticeable impact (Ryzen 5600 / RX 6800XT).
For gamers, it’s likely a 1-5 FPS loss
I highly doubt it… would love to see some hard data on that. Most algorithms used for disk encryption these days are already faster than RAM, and most games are not reading gigabytes/sec from the disk every frame during gameplay for this to ever matter.
If it has to go to disk for immediate loading of assets while playing a video game you’re losing more than 1-5 fps
Maybe, but not every frame while you’re playing. No game is loading gigs of data every frame. That would be the only way most encryption algorithms would slow you down.
Yeah was thinking about that (edited to add immediate) – games are certainly background loading nowadays but the stuff needed is intended to be in ram by the time it’s needed, afaik.
You’re more likely going to get stuttering or asset streaming issues which are going to have more impact than losing a few fps.
Yeah, I’m sure there are a lot of variables there. I can only say that in my experience, I noticed zero impact to gaming performance when I started encrypting everything about 10 years ago. No stuttering or noticeable frame loss. It was a seamless experience and brings real peace of mind knowing that our financial info, photos, and other sensitive files are safely locked away.
For sure I’m just saying i’d guess that’s because at play time you’re loading everything into ram. For bulk loading I would encryption perf follows the general use case.
(Tldr encryption shouldn’t matter for games)
I have three things to say:
- Everyone, please make sure you’ve set up sound disk encryption
- That’s not a suprise (for me at least)
- It’s not much different on mobile (db is unecrypted) - check out molly (signal fork) if you want to encrypt it. However encrypted db means no messages until you decrypt it.
Ah yes, another prime example that demonstrates that Lemmy is no different than Reddit. Everyone thinks they are a professional online.
Nothing sensitive should ever lack encryption especially in the hands of a third party company managing your data claiming you are safe and your privacy is protected.
No one is invincible and it’s okay to criticize the apps we hold to high regards. If your are pissed people are shitting on Signal you should be pissed Signal gave people a reason to shit on them.
Where are you going to store the encryption key? At the end of the day the local machine is effectively pwded anyway
especially in the hands of a third party company managing your data claiming you are safe and your privacy is protected.
Yeah, especially in this specific situation that isn’t relevant to this situation.
If your device gets compromised, it’s no longer the company’s problem.
lack encryption especially in the hands of a third party company managing your data
Are we still talking about local-only keys?
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I presume keys are already sort of encrypted?
Nope. Your presumption is wrong.
👍
Why is Signal almost universally defended whenever another security flaw is discovered? They’re not secure, they don’t address security issues, and their business model is unsustainable in the long term.
But, but, if you have malware “you have bigger problems”. But, but, an attacker would have to have “physical access” to exploit this. Wow, such bullshit. Do some of you people really understand what you’re posting?
But, but, “windows is compromised right out of the box”. Yes…and?
But, but, “Signal doesn’t claim to be secure”. Fuck off, yes they do.
But, but, “just use disk encryption”. Just…no…WTF?
Anybody using Signal for secure messaging is misguided. Any on of your recipients could be using the desktop app and there’s no way to know unless they tell you. On top of that, all messages filter through Signal’s servers, adding a single-point-of-failure to everything. Take away the servers, no more Signal.
If someone can read my Signal keys on my desktop, they can also:
- Replace my Signal app with a maliciously modified version
- Install a program that sends the contents of my desktop notifications (likely including Signal messages) somewhere
- Install a keylogger
- Run a program that captures screenshots when certain conditions are met
- [a long list of other malware things]
Signal should change this because it would add a little friction to a certain type of attack, but a messaging app designed for ease of use and mainstream acceptance cannot provide a lot of protection against an attacker who has already gained the ability to run arbitrary code on your user account.
Not necessarily.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
If you read anything, at least read this link to self correct.
This is a common area where non-security professionals out themselves as not actually being such: The broken/fallacy reasoning about security risk management. Generally the same “Dismissive security by way of ignorance” premises.
It’s fundamentally the same as “safety” (Think OSHA and CSB) The same thought processes, the same risk models, the same risk factors…etc
And similarly the same negligence towards filling in holes in your “swiss cheese model”.
“Oh that can’t happen because that would mean x,y,z would have to happen and those are even worse”
“Oh that’s not possible because A happening means C would have to happen first, so we don’t need to consider this is a risk”
…etc
The same logic you’re using is the same logic that the industry has decades of evidence showing how wrong it is.
Decades of evidence indicating that you are wrong, you know infinitely less than you think you do, and you most definitely are not capable of exhaustively enumerating all influencing factors. No one is. It’s beyond arrogant for anyone to think that they could 🤦🤦 🤦
Thus, most risks are considered valid risks (this doesn’t necessarily mean they are all mitigatable though). Each risk is a hole in your model. And each hole is in itself at a unique risk of lining up with other holes, and developing into an actual safety or security incident.
In this case
- signal was alerted to this over 6 years ago
- the framework they use for the desktop app already has built-in features for this problem.
- this is a common problem with common solutions that are industry-wide.
- someone has already made a pull request to enable the electron safe storage API. And signal has ignored it.
Thus this is just straight up negligence on their part.
There’s not really much in the way of good excuses here. We’re talking about a run of the mill problem that has baked in solutions in most major frameworks including the one signal uses.
I was just nodding along, reading your post thinking, yup, agreed. Until I saw there was a PR to fix it that signal ignored, that seems odd and there must be some mitigating circumstances on why they haven’t merged it.
Otherwise that’s just inexcusable.
The PR had some issues regarding files that were pushed that shouldn’t have been, adding refactors that should have been in separate PRs, etc…
Though the main reason is that Signal doesn’t consider this issue a part of their threat model.
Those are outside Signal’s scope and depend entirely on your OS and your (or your sysadmin’s) security practices (eg. I’m almost sure in linux you need extra privileges for those things on top of just read access to the user’s home directory).
The point is, why didn’t the Signal devs code it the proper way and obtain the credentials every time (interactively from the user or automatically via the OS password manager) instead of just storing them in plain text?
They’re arguing a red herring. They don’t understand security risk modeling, argument about signals scope let’s their broken premise dig deeper. It’s fundamentally flawed.
It’s a risk and should be mitigated using common tools already provided by every major operating system (ie. Keychain).
“Highways shouldn’t have guard rails because if you hit one you’ve already gone off the road anyway.”
You’d need write access to the user’s home directory, but doing something with desktop notifications on modern Linux is as simple as
dbus-monitor "interface='org.freedesktop.Notifications'" | grep --line-buffered "member=Notify\|string" | [insert command here]Replacing the Signal app for that user also doesn’t require elevated privileges unless the home directory is mounted
noexec.Feel free to submit a pull request. We could use your help.
I don’t see the reasoning in your answer (I do see its passive-aggressiveness, but chose to ignore it).
I asked “why?”; does your reply mean “because lack of manpower”, “because lack of skill” or something else entirely?
In case you are new to the FOSS world, that being “open source” doesn’t mean that something cannot be criticized or that people without the skill (or time!) to submit PRs must shut the fu*k up.
It’s in the draft phase from what I can see.
(for Android) https://molly.im/ restores the encryption to this file and adds other useful things
Anybody using Signal for secure messaging is misguided. Any one of your recipients could be using the desktop app and there’s no way to know unless they tell you.
That’s why I only communicate face-to-face inside of a soundproofed faraday cage.
If the app manages the keys, then you can’t trust the app.
If the recipient manages their own keys, then you can’t trust the recipient.
Encryption is fundamentally insecure. Once I encrypt something, nobody should be able to decrypt it ever again.
Now replace “signal” in your comment with “ssh” and think it over.
It’s true, anyone using SSH for secure messaging is absolutely misguided.
Ah the old Lemmy SHHwitcharoo.
SSHwitcharoo
Thank you.
I hope you are joking
98% of desktop apps (at least on Windows and Linux) are already broken by design anyways. Any one app can spy on and keylog all other apps, all your home folder data, everything. And anyone can write a desktop app, so only using solutions that (currently) don’t have a desktop app version, seems silly to me.
I don’t think apps can read keystrokes for other apps on Wayland.
Wayland doesn’t magically make other kinds of keyloggers stop working altogether though.
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/23mj49/wayland_is_not_immune_to_keyloggers/
https://github.com/Aishou/wayland-keylogger
https://github.com/schauveau/sway-keylogger
https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/11h5tvl/wayland_security_keyloggers_are_back/
Unless you have root
If you have root you could just update the kernel to one that lets you do whatever you want on the system, so there’s no way to stop the attacker from viewing the passwords if the app is capable of displaying them.
Linux has a sandbox solution growing in popularity, flatpak.
And Wayland. Xorg is a complete and utter mess
Basically for the same reason people often defend apple: the user interface is shiny, and they claim to be privacy oriented.
Signal is a centralized US hosted service, that alone should be enough to disqualify it, outside of our many other criticisms.
Whats the next best alternative?
Meeting in person.
I’ll organise a time and place to meet in person via … Carrier pigeon?
We’re citizens raging against phones Lazlow.
With a helicopter over you, loud music next to you, and a dude mowing next to you.
And no smartphone in your pocket, of course.
That depends on your threat model. What are you worried about?
(for Android) https://molly.im/
I can find the desktop client, am I missing something?
You’re right, there isn’t one, my apologies; I edited the comment.
You could use some kind of encrypted container on the desktop though, or maybe run it as a separate user that has an encrypted home folder. The problem is you need to define a threat model first. Depending on what you’re afraid of, any particular “solution” could either be way overkill, or never enough.
Matrix or xmpp, bonus points with a personal server
Thanks to interest of late, the conversations and gajim apps have come a long way in recent years, and matrix has made good strides too with element-x
I’d tried matix but without a high level of technical experience it was pretty difficult to setup. I got as far as docker, that needed ansible, that wouldn’t compile. I also recall there was services I could pay for, but then I’d rely on them to provide the security/servers.
Matrix doesn’t seem for the majority of people taking a first step away from big tech.
Snikket is meant to be super simple to self-host. Ejabberd has a web GUI that can make configuration easier.
bonus points with a personal server
Only with appservices. Doesn’t make sense otherwise.
I would only ever suggest matrix if you’re running a private self-hosted instance that is NOT federated, which you can do even easier with Signal anyways.
That’s fine, but why?
It is a privacy and GDPR nightmare, basically all federated services right now are.
https://github.com/libremonde-org/paper-research-privacy-matrix.org/blob/master/part1/README.md
https://web.archive.org/web/20240611200030/https://hackea.org/notas/matrix.html
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-06-17-matrix-notes/
https://web.archive.org/web/20210804205638/https://serpentsec.1337.cx/matrix
Looked into anarc blog. What there wss said about Matrix can be said about SMTP and probably XMPP. To do GDPR you need to know every server you have sent message to. And compared to IRC defaults(forward and remove) anything will look like GDPR nightmare. GDPR was not designed for federated(like matrix and activitypub) communications and especially wasn’t designed for peer-to-peer communications.
Interesting, thanks for the links I’ll take a look
But, but, “just use disk encryption”. Just…no…WTF?
So not encrypting keys is bad, but actually encrypting them is bad too? Ok.
Any on of your recipients could be using the desktop app and there’s no way to know unless they tell you.
Another applefan? How it THIS supposed to be in scope of E2EE? Moreover, how having a way to know if recepient is using desktop app is not opposite of privacy?
On top of that, all messages filter through Signal’s servers, adding a single-point-of-failure to everything. Take away the servers, no more Signal.
Indeed. This is why I use Matrix. Also, fuck showing phone numbers to everyone(I heard they did something about it) and registration with phone numbers.
Any “secure” so that relies on someone else for security is not secure.
Fuck the scope of E2EE. Signal makes a lot of claims on their website that are laughable. The desktop app is their main weakness. Attachments are stored unencrypted, keys in plaintext. If they were serious about security, they would depricate the windows app and block it from their servers.
WTF does Apple have to do with anything?
Any “secure” so that relies on someone else for security is not secure.
Fuck the scope of E2EE.
When someone has FSB/NSA agent behind them reading messages, no amount of encryption will help. Biggest cybersecurity vulnreability is located between monitor and chair. When you are texting someone else, that someone else’s chair-monitor space is also vulnreable.
Signal makes a lot of claims on their website that are laughable.
Well, maybe. I didn’t read their claims, nor I use signal.
Attachments are stored unencrypted, keys in plaintext.
Is OS-level encryption plaintext or not? If yes, then they are encrypted, provided user enables such feature in OS. If not - nothing if encrypted fundamentally.
If they were serious about security, they would depricate the windows app and block it from their servers.
WTF does Apple have to do with anything?
You just used applefans’ argument. Yeah, I wonder what.
Well, maybe. I didn’t read their claims, nor I use signal.
Your opinions are invalid.
What app stops a pre install keylogger. I’m all for hearing criticism of Signal but it’s always about things they can’t control.
They can’t control if the encryption keys are stored in plaintext?
Ok I didn’t mean that in particular
Bruh windows and linux have a secrets vault (cred manager and keyring respectively, iirc) for this exact purpose.
Even Discord uses it on both OSs no problem
The real problem is that the security model for apps on mobile is much better than that for apps on desktop. Desktop apps should all have private storage that no other non-root app can access. And while we’re at it, they should have to ask permission before activating the mic or camera.
macOS has nailed it*, even though it’s still not as good as iOS or Android, but leagues and bounds better than Windows and especially Linux.
ETC: *sandboxing/permission system
What’s wrong with the Flatpak permissions system on Linux?
It’s a joke. Apps have defined permissions already allowed on install and some of them have too many things set to allow like home or host access. Also, changing any permission requires restarting the app. It’s heading in the right direction, but it has a looooong way to go to catch up with macOS, let alone Android and iOS.
What does Windows do? Genuine question, I’ve not used it since the 7 days. Regarding Linux, that’s true for stuff installed through regular package managers and whatnot, but Flatpak is pushing a more sandboxed and permission oriented system, akin to Android.
You have granular control over universal windows apps (ie windows 8+ apps) and one global lock over all desktop apps (non uwp), and one global lock over everything. It’s pretty solid considering how little control Microsoft has and it’s wonderful fetish for compatibility.
Tldr basically same as Linux, except app distribution in Linux was bad enough for so long that more stuff is in the new restricted format while windows still has tons of things which will never go away and aren’t in the sandbox. I think not finding a way to sandbox all desktop apps was a mistake.
Firejail and bwrap. Flatpaks. There are already ways to do this, but I only know of one distro that separates apps by default like Android does (separate user per app), which is the brand new “EasyOS”.
They do sort of with Flatpak
There is just no excuse for not even salting or SOMETHING to keep the secrets out of plaintext. The reason you don’t store in plaintext is because it can lead to even incidental collection. Say you have some software, perhaps spyware, perhaps it’s made by a major corporation so doesn’t get called that and it crawls around and happens to upload a copy of a full or portion of the file containing this info, now it’s been uploaded and compromised potentially not even by a malicious actor successfully gaining access to a machine but by poor practices.
No it can’t stop a sophisticated malware specifically targeting Signal to steal credentials and gain access but it does mean casual malware that hasn’t taken the time out to write a module to do that is out of luck and increases the burden on attackers. No it won’t stop the NSA but it’s still something that it stops someone’s 17 year old niece who knows a little bit about computers but is no malware author from gaining access to your signal messages and account because she could watch a youtube video and follow along with simple tools.
The claims Signal is an op or the runner is under a national security letter order to compromise it look more and more plausible in light of weird bad basic practices like this and their general hostility. I’ll still use it and it’s far from the worst looking thing out there but there’s something unshakably weird about the lead dev, their behavior and practices that can’t be written off as being merely a bit quirky.
To encrypt it you would need to store a encryption key
It’s plaintext all the way down.
The irony
for not even salting
Wrong secret
I mean combined with any kind of function, even a trivial kind. A salt derived from some machine state data (a random install id generated on install, a hash of computer name, etc) plus a rot13 or something would still be better than leaving it plaintext.
Malware has access to it.
If fs is not encrypted, then malicious hardware(FSB agent’s laptop) also has access to it. If encrypted, then it we are back to statement many people told here about encrypting fs.
plus a rot13
That’s not salting.
This just in: threat actors compromising your devices is bad. More at 11.
Obviously the keys could be stored more securely, but if you’ve got malware on your machine that can exploit this you’ve already got bigger problems.
That’s not how this works.
This sort of “dismissive security through ignorance” is how we get so many damn security breaches these days.
I see this every day with software engineers, a group that you would think would be above the bar on security. Unfortunately a little bit of knowledge results in a mountain of confidence (see Dunning Kruger effect). They are just confident in bad choices instead.
“We don’t need to use encryption at rest because if the database is compromised we have bigger problems” really did a lot to protect the last few thousand companies from preventable data exfiltration that was in fact the largest problem they had.
Turns out that having read access to the underlying storage for the database doesn’t necessarily mean that the database and all of your internal systems are more compromised. It just means that the decision makers were making poor decisions based on a lack of risk modeling knowledge.
That said the real question I have for you here is:
Are you confident in your omniscience in that you can enumerate all risks and attack factors that can result in data being exfiltrated from a device?
If not, then why comment as if you are?
