How in the fuck are people actually defending signal for this, and with stupid arguments such as windows is compromised out of the box?
You. Don’t. Store. Secrets. In. Plaintext.
There is no circumstance where an app should store its secrets in plaintext, and there is no secret which should be stored in plaintext.
Especially since this is not some random dudes random project, but a messenger claiming to be secure.
Edit:
“If you got malware then this is a problem anyway and not only for signal” - no, because if secure means to store secrets are used, than they are encrypted or not easily accessible to the malware, and require way more resources to obtain. In this case, someone would only need to start a process on your machine. No further exploits, no malicious signatures, no privilege escalations.
“you need device access to exploit this” - There is no exploiting, just reading a file.
Yes, in your head, and in your second factor, if possible, keeping derived secrets always encrypted at rest, decrypting at the latest possible moment and not storing (decrypted) secrets in-memory for longer than absolutely necessary at use.
SSH stores the secret keys in plaintext too. In a home dir accessible only by the owning user.
I won’t speak about Windows but on Linux and other Unix systems the presumption is that if your home dir is compromised you’re fucked anyway. Effort should be spent on actually protecting access to the home personal files not on security theater.
Well yes, but also how would users react if they had to type in their passphrase every time they open the app?
This is also exactly what we’re giving up everywhere else by clicking ‘remember this device’.
I think the point is the developers might have just migrated the code without adjustments since that is how it was implemented before. Similar to how PC game ports sometimes run like shit since they are a close 1-1 of the original which is not always the most optimized or ideal, but the quickest to output.
How in the fuck are people actually defending signal for this, and with stupid arguments such as windows is compromised out of the box?
You. Don’t. Store. Secrets. In. Plaintext.
There is no circumstance where an app should store its secrets in plaintext, and there is no secret which should be stored in plaintext. Especially since this is not some random dudes random project, but a messenger claiming to be secure.
Edit: “If you got malware then this is a problem anyway and not only for signal” - no, because if secure means to store secrets are used, than they are encrypted or not easily accessible to the malware, and require way more resources to obtain. In this case, someone would only need to start a process on your machine. No further exploits, no malicious signatures, no privilege escalations.
“you need device access to exploit this” - There is no exploiting, just reading a file.
If someone has access to your machine you are screwed anyway. You need to store the encryption key somewhere
Yes, in your head, and in your second factor, if possible, keeping derived secrets always encrypted at rest, decrypting at the latest possible moment and not storing (decrypted) secrets in-memory for longer than absolutely necessary at use.
SSH stores the secret keys in plaintext too. In a home dir accessible only by the owning user.
I won’t speak about Windows but on Linux and other Unix systems the presumption is that if your home dir is compromised you’re fucked anyway. Effort should be spent on actually protecting access to the home personal files not on security theater.
Not true, SSH keys need their passphrase to be used. If you don’t set one, that’s on you.
Well yes, but also how would users react if they had to type in their passphrase every time they open the app? This is also exactly what we’re giving up everywhere else by clicking ‘remember this device’.
Probably because Android (at least) already uses file-based encryption, and the files stored by apps are not readable by other apps anyways.
And if people had to type in a password every time they started the app, they just wouldn’t use it.
Emphasis mine.
I think the point is the developers might have just migrated the code without adjustments since that is how it was implemented before. Similar to how PC game ports sometimes run like shit since they are a close 1-1 of the original which is not always the most optimized or ideal, but the quickest to output.