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Signal under fire for storing encryption keys in plaintext (stackdiary.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Recant@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

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As mentioned in the comments, plain text keys aren't bad because they are necessary. You have to have at least one plain text key in order to be able to use encryption

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[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

How does that help when somebody has access to the phone via your PIN or password?

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] chris@l.roofo.cc 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I'm not mistaken you can save keys in these chips so that they can not be extracted. You can only use the key to encrypt/decrypt/sign/verify by asking the chip to do these operations with your key.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That sounds only marginally better. Access to the phone still means you can create a backup containing the key, so TPM wouldn't help much.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] scott@lem.free.as 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One would hope the backup is encrypted.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It is. A password is generated that you have to write down. It must've been a compromise because they knew most people would just pick a shitty password if they didn't generate one and it would end up on a piece of paper or in some digital form anyway.

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