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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • They aren’t. From a comment on https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/32mos6/ublock_vs_ublock_origin/ by u/tehdang:

    For people who have stumbled into this thread while googling “ublock vs origin”. Take a look at this link:

    http://tuxdiary.com/2015/06/14/ublock-origin/

    "Chris AlJoudi [current owner of uBlock] is under fire on Reddit due to several actions in recent past:

    • In a Wikipedia edit for uBlock, Chris removed all credits to Raymond [Hill, original author and owner of uBlock Origin] and added his name without any mention of the original author’s contribution.
    • Chris pledged a donation with overblown details on expenses like $25 per week for web hosting.
    • The activities of Chris since he took over the project are more business and advertisement oriented than development driven."

    So I would recommend that you go with uBlock Origin and not uBlock. I hope this helps!

    Edit: Also got this bit of information from here:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/32ory7/ublock_is_back_under_a_new_name/

    TL;DR:

    • gorhill [Raymond Hill] got tired of dozens of “my facebook isnt working plz help” issues.
    • he handed the repository to chrismatic [Chris Aljioudi] while maintaining control of the extension in the Chrome webstore (by forking chrismatic’s version back to himself).
    • chrismatic promptly added donate buttons and a “made with love by Chris” note.
    • gorhill took exception to this and asked chrismatic to change the name so people didn’t confuse uBlock (the original, now called uBlock Origin) and uBlock (chrismatic’s version).
    • Google took down gorhill’s extension. Apparently this was because of the naming issue (since technically chrismatic has control of the repo).
    • gorhill renamed and rebranded his version of ublock to uBlock Origin.

  • Is it possible to force a corruption if a disk clone is attempted?

    Anything that corrupts a single file would work. You could certainly change your own disk cloning binaries to include such functionality, but if someone were accessing your data directly via their own OS, that wouldn’t be effective. I don’t know of a way to circumvent that last part other than ensuring that the data isn’t left on disk when you’re done. For example, you could use a ramdisk instead of non-volatile storage. You could delete or intentionally corrupt the volume when you unmount it. You could split the file, storing half on your USB flash drive and keeping the other half on your PC. You could XOR the file with contents of another file (e.g., one on your USB flash drive instead of on your PC) and then XOR it again when you need to access it.

    What sort of attack are you trying to protect from here?

    If the goal is plausible deniability, then it’s worth noting that VeraCrypt volumes aren’t identifiable as distinct from random data. So if you have a valid reason for having a big block of random data on disk, you could say that’s what the file was. Random files are useful because they are not compressible. For example, you could be using those files to test: network/storage media performance or compression/hash/backup&restore/encrypt&decrypt functions. You could be using them to have a repeatable set of random values to use in a program (like using a seed, but without necessarily being limited to using a PRNG to generate the sequence).

    If that’s not sufficient, you should look into hidden volumes. The idea is that you take a regular encrypted volume, whose free space, on disk, looks just like random data, you store your hidden volume within the free space. The hidden volume gets its own password. Then, you can mount the volume using the first password and get visibility into a “decoy” set of files or use the second password to view your “hidden” files. Note that when mounting it to view the decoy files, any write operations will have a chance of corrupting the hidden files. However, you can supply both passwords to mount it in a protected mode, allowing you to change the decoy files and avoid corrupting the hidden ones.


  • It sounds like you want these files to be encrypted.

    Someone already suggested encrypting them with GPG, but maybe you want the files themselves to also be isolated, even while their data is encrypted. In that case, consider an encrypted volume. I assume you’re familiar with LUKS - you can encrypt a partition with a different password and disable auto-mount pretty easily. But if you’d rather use a file-based volume, then check out VeraCrypt - it’s a FOSS-ish [1], cross-platform tool that provides this capability. The official documentation is very Windows-focused - the ArchLinux wiki article is a pretty useful Linux focused alternative.

    Normal operation is that you use a file to store the volume, which can be “dynamic” with a max size or can be statically sized (you can also directly encrypt a disk partition, but you could do that with LUKS, too). Then, before you can access the files - read or write - you have to enter the password, supply the encryption key, etc., in order to unlock it.

    Someone without the password but with permission to modify the file will be capable of corrupting it (which would prevent you from accessing every protected file), but unless they somehow got access to the password they wouldn’t be able to view or modify the protected files.

    The big advantage over LUKS is ease of creating/mounting file-based volumes and portability. If you’re concerned about another user deleting your encrypted volume, then you can easily back it up without decrypting it. You can easily load and access it on other systems, too - there are official, stable apps on Windows and Mac, though you’ll need admin access to run them. On Android and iOS options are a bit more slim - EDS on Android and Disk Decipher on iOS. If you’re copying a volume to a Linux system without VeraCrypt installed, you’ll likely still be able to mount it, as dm-crypt has support for VeraCrypt volumes.

    • 1 - It’s based on TrueCrypt, which has some less free restrictions, e.g., c. Phrase "Based on TrueCrypt, freely available at http://www.truecrypt.org/" must be displayed by Your Product (if technically feasible) and contained in its documentation.”



  • hedgehog@ttrpg.networktoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    15 days ago

    Tons of laptops with top notch specs for 1/2 the price of a M1/2 out there

    The 13” M1 MacBook Air is $700 new from Best Buy. Better specced versions are available for $600 used (buy-it-now) on eBay, but the base specced version is available for $500 or less.

    What $300 or less used / $350 new laptops are you recommending here?




  • And when you’re comparing two closed source options, there are techniques available to evaluate them. Based off the results of people who have published their results from using these techniques, Apple is not as private as they claim. This is most egregious when it comes to first party apps, which is concerning. However, when it comes to using any non-Apple app, they’re much better than Google is when using any non-Google app.

    There’s enough overlap in skillset that pretty much anyone performing those evaluations will likely find it trivial to configure Android to be privacy-respecting - i.e., by using GrapheneOS on a Pixel or some other custom ROM - but most users are not going to do that.

    And if someone is not going to do that, Android is worse for their privacy.

    It doesn’t make sense to say “iPhones are worse at respecting user privacy than Android phones” when by default and in practice for most people, the opposite is true. What we should be saying is “iPhones are better at respecting privacy by default, but if privacy is important to you, the best option is to put in a bit of extra work and install GrapheneOS on a Pixel.”





  • That’s still a single point of failure.

    So is TLS or the compromise of a major root certificate authority, and those have no bearing on whether an approach qualifies as using 2FA.

    The question is “How vulnerable is your authentication approach to attack?” If an approach is especially vulnerable, like using SMS or push notifications (where you tap to confirm vs receiving a code that you enter in the app) for 2FA, then it should be discouraged. So the question becomes “Is storing your TOTP secrets in your password manager an especially vulnerable approach to authentication?” I don’t believe it is, and further, I don’t believe it’s any more vulnerable than using a separate app on your mobile device (which is the generally recommended alternative).

    What happens if someone finds an exploit that bypasses the login process entirely?

    Then they get a copy of your encrypted vault. If your vault password is weak, they’ll be able to crack it and get access to everything. This is a great argument for making sure you have a good vault password, but there are a lot of great arguments for that.

    Or do you mean that they get access to your logged in vault by compromising your device? That’s the most likely worst case scenario, and in such a scenario:

    • all of your logged in accounts can be compromised by stealing your sessions
    • even if you use a different app for your 2FA, those TOTP secrets and passkeys can be stolen - they have to be on a different device
    • you’re also likely to be subject to a ransomware attack

    In other words, your only accounts that are not vulnerable in this situation solely because their TOTP secret is on a different device are the ones you don’t use on that device in the first place. This is mostly relevant if your computer is compromised - if your phone is compromised, then it doesn’t matter that you use a separate password manager and authenticator app.

    If you use an account on your computer, since it can be compromised without having the credentials on device, you might as well have the credentials on device. If you’re concerned about the device being compromised and want to protect an account that you don’t use on that device, then you can store the credentials in a different vault that isn’t stored on your device.

    Even more common, though? MITM phishing attacks. If your password manager verifies the url, fills the password, and fills your TOTP, then that can help against those. Start using a different device and those protections fall away. If your vault has been compromised and your passwords are known to an attacker, but they don’t have your TOTP secrets, you’re at higher risk of erroneously entering them into a phishing site.

    Either approach (same app vs different app) has trade-offs and both approaches are vulnerable to different sorts of attacks. It doesn’t make sense to say that one counts as 2FA but the other doesn’t. They’re differently resilient - that’s it. Consider your individual threat model and one may be a better option than the other.

    That said, if you’re concerned about the resiliency of your 2FA approach, then look into using dedicated security keys. U2F / WebAuthn both give better phishing resistance than a browser extension filling a password or TOTP can, and having the private key inaccessible can help mitigate device compromise concerns.





  • Ah, fair enough. I was just giving people interested in that method a resource to learn more about it.

    The problem is that your method doesn’t consistently generate memorable passwords with anywhere near 77 bits of entropy.

    First, the example you gave ended up being 11 characters long. For a completely random password using alphanumeric characters + punctuation, that’s 66.5 bits of entropy. Your lower bound was 8 characters, which is even worse (48 bits of entropy). And when you consider that the process will result in some letters being much more probable, particularly in certain positions, that results in a more vulnerable process. I’m not sure how much that reduces the entropy, but it would have an impact. And that’s without exploiting the fact that you’re using quoted as part of your process.

    The quote selection part is the real problem. If someone knows your quote and your process, game over, as the number of remaining possibilities at that point is quite low - maybe a thousand? That’s worse than just adding a word with the dice method. So quote selection is key.

    But how many quotes is a user likely to select from? My guess is that most users would be picking from a set of fewer than 7,776 quotes, but your set and my set would be different. Even so, I doubt that the set an attacker would need to discern from is higher than 470 billion quotes (the equivalent of three dice method words), and it’s certainly not 2.8 quintillion quotes (the equivalent of 5 dice method words).

    If your method were used for a one-off, you could use a poorly known quote and maybe have it not be in that 470 billion quote set, but that won’t remain true at scale. It certainly wouldn’t be feasible to have a set of 2.8 quintillion quotes, which means that even a 20 character password has less than 77.5 bits of entropy.

    Realistically, since the user is choosing a memorable quote, we could probably find a lot of them in a very short list - on the order of thousands at best. Even with 1 million quotes to choose from, that’s at best 30 bits of entropy. And again, user choice is a problem, as user choice doesn’t result in fully random selections.

    If you’re randomly selecting from a 60 million quote database, then that’s still only 36 bits of entropy. When the database has 470 billion quotes, that’ll get you to 49 bits of entropy - but good luck ensuring that all 470 billion quotes are memorable.

    There are also things you can do, at an individual level, to make dice method passwords stronger or more suitable to a purpose. You can modify the word lists, for one. You can use the other lists. When it comes to password length restrictions, you can use the EFF short list #2 and truncate words after the third character without losing entropy - meaning your 8 word password only needs to be 32 characters long, or 24 characters, if you omit word separators. You can randomly insert a symbol and a number and/or substitute them, sacrificing memorizability for a bit more entropy (mainly useful when there are short password length limits).

    The dice method also has baked-in flexibility when it comes to the necessary level of entropy. If you need more than 82 bits of entropy, just add more words. If you’re okay with having less entropy, you can generate shorter passwords - 62 bits of entropy is achieved with a 6 short-word password (which can be reduced to 18 characters) and a 4 short-word password - minimum 12 characters - still has 41 bits of entropy.

    With your method, you could choose longer quotes for applications you want to be more secure or shorter quotes for ones where that’s less important, but that reduces entropy overall by reducing the set of quotes you can choose from. What you’d want to do is to have a larger set of quotes for your more critical passwords. But as we already showed, unless you have an impossibly huge quote database, you can’t generate high entropy passwords with this method anyway. You could select multiple unrelated quotes, sure - two quotes selected from a list of 10 billion gives you 76.4 bits of entropy - but that’s the starting point for the much easier to memorize, much easier to generate, dice method password. You’ve also ended up with a password that’s just as long - up to 40 characters - and much harder to type.

    This problem is even worse with the method that the EFF proposes, as it’ll output passphrases with an average of 42 characters, all of them alphabetic.

    Yes, but as pass phrases become more common, sites restricting password length become less common. My point wasn’t that this was a problem but that many site operators felt that it was fine to cap their users’ passwords’ max entropy at lower than 77.5 bits, and few applications require more than that much entropy. (Those applications, for what it’s worth, generally use randomly generated keys rather than relying on user-generated ones.)

    And, as I outlined above, you can use the truncated short words #2 list method to generate short but memorable passwords when limited in this way. My general recommendation in this situation is to use a password manager for those passwords and to generate a high entropy, completely random password for them, rather than trying to memorize them. But if you’re opposed to password managers for some reason, the dice method is still a great option.