17
Signal under fire for storing encryption keys in plaintext
(stackdiary.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
17 points (66.0% liked)
Cybersecurity
5677 readers
124 users here now
c/cybersecurity is a community centered on the cybersecurity and information security profession. You can come here to discuss news, post something interesting, or just chat with others.
THE RULES
Instance Rules
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- No Ads / Spamming.
- No pornography.
Community Rules
- Idk, keep it semi-professional?
- Nothing illegal. We're all ethical here.
- Rules will be added/redefined as necessary.
If you ask someone to hack your "friends" socials you're just going to get banned so don't do that.
Learn about hacking
Other security-related communities !databreaches@lemmy.zip !netsec@lemmy.world !cybersecurity@lemmy.capebreton.social !securitynews@infosec.pub !netsec@links.hackliberty.org !cybersecurity@infosec.pub !pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub
Notable mention to !cybersecuritymemes@lemmy.world
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Ah yes, the old "your data isn't safe when an attacker has full access to your pc account" vulnerability
Yeah fuck security in layers, my first layer is 100% bulletproof so I got no reason to worry
Exactly, which is why your drives should be encrypted.
Once you lose physical control of a device, all bets are off, drive encryption at least slows down attackers significantly.
I have far more sensitive, and a greater volume of data, on the drive than just comms.
Drive encryption wouldn't do anything to mitigate this though? A process running on your PC needs access to your drive, and so with the current setup you have either the option to trust 100% every software with your signal encryption keys, or to simply not use them.
Seems like a pretty big security flaw that we have actual solutions to.
You could maybe form a hackey way to allow only the signal process to an encrypted FUSE filesystem that decrypts its own keys on the fly, but again there's already ways to do this in software that isn't like using a wrench to plug a leak. (and this setup would just have it's own set of keys that need to be protected now, probably by a traditional method like kwallet)
I mean... Every serious operating system already has some form of keyring feature right?
Ie. what signal should be using, yet isnt
there is SELinux which give more fine tuned permissions for each app but it was too complicated for me
And if you're using SELinux as a kwallet/keyring replacement, you're using it wrong (but again security in layers doesn't stop you from using both)
Not necessarily. There are many paths to exfiltrated data that don't require privileged access, and can be exploited through vulnerabilities in other applications.