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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • upon reading a bit how different wallets work, it seems macos is able to identify the program requesting the keychain access when it’s signed with a certificate - idk if that’s the case for signal desktop on mac, and I don’t know what happens if the program is not signed.

    As for gnome-keyring, they ackowledge that doing it on Linux distros this is a much larger endeavor due to the attack surface:

    An active attack is where the attacker can change something in your security context. In the context of gnome-keyring an active attacker would have access to your user session in some way. An active attacker might install an application on your computer, display a window, listen into the X events going to another window, read through your memory, snoop on you from a root account etc.

    While it’d be nice for gnome-keyring to someday be hardened against active attacks originating from the user’s session, the reality is that the free software “desktop” today just isn’t architected with those things in mind. We need completion and integration things like the following. Kudos to the great folks working on parts of this stuff:

    - Trusted X (for prompting)
    - Pervasive use of security contexts for different apps (SELinux, AppArmor)
    - Application signing (for ACLs) 
    

    We’re not against the goal of protecting against active attacks, but without hardening of the desktop in general, such efforts amount to security theater.

    Also

    An example of security theater is giving the illusion that somehow one application running in a security context (such as your user session) can keep information from another application running in the same security context.

    In other words, the problem is beyond the scope of gnome-keyring. Maybe now with diffusion of Wayland and more sandboxing options reducing this context becomes viable.


  • let me just highlight that if someone has access only to your signal desktop conversations, they have access to your signal desktop conversations.

    if someone has access to your windows recall db, they have access to your signal desktop conversations, the pages you’ve browsed including in private windows, documents you’ve written, games you’ve played, social media posts you’ve seen, and pretty much anything you’ve done using that machine.

    perhaps that does demand a slightly different level of concern.


  • But that’s the thing: I haven’t found anything that indicates it can differentiate a legitimate access from a dubious one; at least not without asking the user to authorize it by providing a password and causing the extra inconvenience.

    If the wallet asked the program itself for a secret - to verify the program was legit and not a malicious script - the program would still have the same problem of storing and retrieving that secret securely; which defeats the use of a secret manager.




  • The whole drama seems to be pushing for Electron’s safeStorage API, which uses a device’s secrets manager. But aren’t secrets stored there still accessible when the machine is unlocked anyway? I’m not sure what this change accomplishes other than encryption at rest with the device turned off - which is redundant if you’re using full disk encryption.

    I don’t think they’re downplaying it, it just doesn’t seem to be this large security concern some people are making it to be.

    This is like the third time in the past two months I’ve seen someone trying to spread FUD around Signal.









  • neural network weights are just files, collections of numbers forming matrices; how is a partially open collection of weights of any use

    the weights are open

    $ docker exec -it ollama ollama show gemma:7b
      Model                              
      	arch            	gemma	             
      	parameters      	9B   	             
      	quantization    	Q4_0 	             
      	context length  	8192 	             
      	embedding length	3072 	             
      	                                  
      Parameters                         
      	stop            	"<start_of_turn>"	 
      	stop            	"<end_of_turn>"  	 
      	penalize_newline	false            	 
      	repeat_penalty  	1                	 
      	                                  
      License                            
      	Gemma Terms of Use              	  
      	Last modified: February 21, 2024