cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Regarding your browser-based thing: what are the specific capabilities of the “threat agents” (in your threat model’s terminology) which your e2ee is intended to protect against?

    It seems like the e2ee is not needed against an attacker who (a) cannot circumvent HTTPS and (b) cannot compromise the server; HTTPS and an honest server will prevent them from seeing plaintext. But, if an attacker can do one of those things, does your e2ee actually stop them?

    The purpose of e2ee is to protect against a malicious server, but, re-fetching JavaScript from the server each time they use the thing means that users must actually rely on the server’s honesty (and HTTPS) completely. There is no way (in a normal web browser) for users to verify that the JavaScript they’re executing is the correct JavaScript.

    If you run a browser-based e2ee service like this and it becomes popular, you should be prepared that somebody might eventually try to compel you to serve malicious JavaScript to specific users. Search “lavabit” or “hushmail” for some well-documented cases where this has happened.











  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    5 months ago

    It’s literally a covert project funded by google to both sell pixels and harvest data of “privooocy” minded users. It seems to be working well.

    Is it actually funded by Google? Citation needed.

    I would assume Graphene users make up a statistically insignificant number of Pixel buyers, and most of the users of it I’ve met opt to use it without any Google services.












  • xzbot from Anthony Weems enables to patch the corrupted liblzma to change the private key used to compare it to the signed ssh certificate, so adding this to your instructions might enable me to demonstrate sshing into the VM :)

    Fun :)

    Btw, instead of installing individual vulnerable debs as those kali instructions I linked to earlier suggest, you could also point debootstrap at the snapshot service so that you get a complete system with everything as it would’ve been in late March and then run that in a VM… or in a container. You can find various instructions for creating containers and VMs using debootstrap (eg, this one which tells you how to run a container with systemd-nspawn; but you could also do it with podman or docker or lxc). When the instructions tell you to run debootstrap, you just want to specify a snapshot URL like https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20240325T212344Z/ in place of the usual Debian repository url (typically https://deb.debian.org/debian/).


  • A daily ISO of Debian testing or Ubuntu 24.04 (noble) beta from prior to the first week of April would be easiest, but those aren’t archived anywhere that I know of. It didn’t make it in to any stable releases of any Debian-based distros.

    But even when you have a vulnerable system running sshd in a vulnerable configuration, you can’t fully demo the backdoor because it requires the attacker to authenticate with their private key (which has not been revealed).

    But, if you just want to run it and observe the sshd slowness that caused the backdoor to be discovered, here are instructions for installing the vulnerable liblzma deb from snapshot.debian.org.