Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Both Assange and Snowden are apparently alive and well, despite Mossad-like agencies wishing otherwise, largely thanks to Tor; and Hamas, whose adversary was in fact the Mossad, apparently still exists. Hizbullah has hopefully taught us all a good lesson about supply-chain attacks.

Debian is probably the only example of a successful public public-key infrastructure, but SSH keys are a perfectly serviceable form of public-key infrastructure in everyday life. At least for developers.

Mickens's skepticism about security labels is, however, justified; the problems he identifies are why object-capability models seem more successful in practice.

I do agree that better passwords are a good idea, and, prior to the widespread deployment of malicious microphones, were adequate authentication for many purposes—if you can avoid being phished. My own secure password generator is http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/bitwords...., and some of its modes are memorable correct-horse-battery-staple-type passwords. It's arguably slightly blasphemous, so you may be offended if you are an observant Hindu.

> prior to the widespread deployment of malicious microphones, were adequate authentication for many purposes

Can you elaborate on this? I don't understand the context for malicious microphones and how that affects secure passwords.

Oh, well, it turns out that keyboard sounds leak enough entropy to make it easy to attack even very strong passwords.

Microphones on devices such as Ring doorbell cameras are explicitly exfiltrating audio data out of your control whenever they're activated. Features like Alexa and Siri require, in some sense, 24/7 microphone activation, although normally that data isn't transmitted off-device except on explicit (vocal) user request. But that control is imposed by non-user-auditable device firmware that can be remotely updated at any time.

Finally, for a variety of reasons, it's becoming increasingly common to have a microphone active and transmitting data intentionally, often to public contexts like livestreaming video.

With the proliferation of such potentially vulnerable microphones in our daily lives, we should not rely too heavily on the secrecy of short strings that can easily leak through the audio channel.

Using a password manager is an easy and useful protection against audio leaks of passwords.

But this is an example of the kind of thing the OP is talking about. You're probably not at a very realistic risk of having your password hacked via audio exfiltrated from the Ring camera at your front door. Unless it's Mossad et al who want your password.

Like "you're probably not at a very realistic risk of having your phone wiretapped", this is overindexing on past experience—remember that until Room 641A commenced operations in 02003 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A), you weren't, and after it did, your phone was virtually guaranteed to be wiretapped. Similarly, you aren't at a very realistic risk of having your password hacked via audio, until someone is doing this to 80% of the people in the world. As far as we know, this hasn't happened yet, but it certainly will.

But again, that’s the Mossad scenario - NSA in this case. You’re essentially reinforcing the OP point. There are three threat models given in Figure 1 of the OP doc, and what you’re saying really only applies to the third.

No, their Mossad threat model is that the Mossad wants to kill particular people, not steal the passwords of literally every single person on Earth.

Why did you choose random’s SystemRandom rather than secrets?

What?

Oh, you mean PEP 506. I wrote this program in 02012, and PEP 506 wasn't written until 02015, didn't ship in a released Python until 3.6 in 02016, and even then was only available in Python 3, which I didn't use because it basically didn't work at the time.

PEP 506 is just 22 lines of code wrapping SystemRandom. There's no advantage over just using SystemRandom directly.

what is 02012 and why write it so strange?

They want to feel like they matter in over 10k years from now, where a 4-digit year would start to wrap.

In fact that will be not even 8k years from now.

I’ll be very embarrassed when I’m still writing 9999 on my checks.

Obviously it's octal and the person is a time traveler from the 11th century.

It's the long now foundation thing. The long now foundation encourages writing years with five digits to encourage readers to think about long term planning, to plan for a future of humanity that is measured in more than thousands of years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45505856>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43463920>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175614>

Neither Assange nor Snowden are a threat anymore. They are contained and have next to no ability anymore. So it would be a waste of resources to pursue them. The lackeys (police etc) are all that’s needed here to harass them and make their lives miserable. What’s Mossad going to do? Kill them with explosives? That takes all the fun out of torturing them and making their lives miserable by proxy.

The only thing I see is that both are contained and quarantined. The threat of both has been neutralized to the degree where I think the espionage agencies of all these countries are playing along together to keep the engine of their craft going uninterrupted without fuss.

In other words, you have to be gullible to think an embassy cares about protecting Assange. It’s a phone call from the secret service director saying “Keep him there for now, it’s where we want him.”

The idea that either of them are at risk of being whacked is utter tinfoil-hattery. The worst Snowden has to fear is being convicted and jailed, and it says a lot about him that he fled to Russia of all places instead of manning up and facing trial.

Snowden didn’t choose Russia as a destination. He left Hong Kong for Latin America and got stranded in Moscow when the U.S. revoked his passport mid-transit. He spent weeks in the airport transit zone while seeking asylum from multiple countries; Russia gave him temporary asylum after that.

“Manning up and facing trial” sounds fair in theory, but under the Espionage Act there’s no public-interest defense. He’d be barred from explaining motive or the public value of the disclosures, much of the case would be classified, and past national-security whistleblowers have faced severe penalties. That’s why he sought asylum.

Being convicted and jailed can be pretty bad. Didn’t Robert Hanssen end up in Florence ADMAX until he died [0]? And, maybe a more direct comparison, Wikileaker Joshua Schulte [1]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADX_Florence

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Schulte

It was the US that forced Snowden into Russia.

> ...Assange and Snowden...

I'd argue that for every Assange and Snowden, there are 100 (1k? 100k?) people using Tor for illegal, immoral, and otherwise terrible things. If you're OK with that, then sure, fine point.

> SSH keys

Heartbleed and Terrapin were both pretty brutal attacks on common PKI infra. It's definitely serviceable and very good, but vulnerabilities can go for forever without being noticed, and when they are found they're devastating.

Mickens was arguing that security was illusory, not, as you are, that it was subversive and immoral. My comments were directed at his point. I am not interested in your idea that it would be better for nobody to have any privacy.

> ...who non-ironically believes that Tor is used for things besides drug deals and kidnapping plots.

That was the quote I was referring to. Also, of course I didn't say that no one should have any privacy; I simply implied a high moral cost for this particular form of privacy.

Continuously updated HTTP response dumps from all the major Tor hidden services: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/

It is accurate to say that Tor's hidden service ecosystem is focused on drugs, ransomware, cryptocurrency, and sex crime.

However, there are other important things happening there. You can think of the crime as cover traffic to hide those important things. So it's all good.

Definitely some heinous-sounding stuff.

The third result was "FREE $FOO PORN" where $FOO was something that nearly the entire human race recognizes as deeply Not Okay and is illegal everywhere.

I wonder what % of the heinous-sounding sites are actually providing the things they say they are.

I'm sure that some (most?) of them actually offer heinous stuff. But surely some of them are honeypots run by law enforcement and some are just straight up scams. However, I have no sense of whether that percentage is 1% or 99%.

If you truly have a secure tool you won’t be able to control what your users do with it.

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