Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • its not meant for children, German fairytales aren’t either

    Woah there! German fairy tales were meant for children! That’s explicitly their target audience.

    The whole point was to scare the children into behaving a certain way. Like, “don’t go wandering off alone. Bad things can happen!”

    If you just tell your kid that they won’t listen. However, if you tell them a story about how kids that wandered off alone into a forest got cooked and eaten by a witch then maybe they’ll stick to the village (and be wary of strangers).







  • This is a, “it’s turtles all the way down!” problem. An application has to be able to store its encryption keys somewhere. You can encrypt your encryption keys but then where do you store that key? Ultimately any application will need access to the plaintext key in order to function.

    On servers the best practice is to store the encryption keys somewhere that isn’t on the server itself. Such as a networked Hardware Security Module (HSM) but literally any location that isn’t physically on/in the server itself is good enough. Some Raspberry Pi attached to the network in the corner of the data center would be nearly as good because the attack you’re protecting against with this kind of encryption is someone walking out of the data center with your server (and then decrypting the data).

    With a device like a phone you can’t use a networked HSM since your phone will be carried around with you everywhere. You could store your encryption keys out on the Internet somewhere but that actually increases the attack surface. As such, the encryption keys get stored on the phone itself.

    Phone OSes include tools like encrypted storage locations for things like encryption keys but realistically they’re no more secure than storing the keys as plaintext in the application’s app-specific store (which is encrypted on Android by default; not sure about iOS). Only that app and the OS itself have access to that storage location so it’s basically exactly the same as the special “secure” storage features… Except easier to use and less likely to be targeted, exploited, and ultimately compromised because again, it’s a smaller attack surface.

    If an attacker gets physical access to your device you must assume they’ll have access to everything on it unless the data is encrypted and the key for that isn’t on the phone itself (e.g. it uses a hash generated from your thumbprint or your PIN). In that case your effective encryption key is your thumb(s) and/or PIN. Because the Signal app’s encryption keys are already encrypted on the filesystem.

    Going full circle: You can always further encrypt something or add an extra step to accessing encrypted data but that just adds inconvenience and doesn’t really buy you any more security (realistically). It’s turtles all the way down.



  • Riskable@programming.devtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldWhat's the deal with Docker?
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    8 months ago

    Docker containers aren’t running in a virtual machine. They’re running what amounts to a fancy chroot jail… It’s just an isolated environment that takes advantage of several kernel security features to make software running inside the environment think everything is normal despite being locked down.

    This is a very important distinction because it means that docker containers are very light weight compared to a VM. They use but a fraction of the resources a VM would and can be brought up and down in milliseconds since there’s no hardware to emulate.










  • Probably because your dishwasher wasn’t engineered to work with powder detergent. I bought a Bosch dishwasher a few years ago and I read the manual where it specifically stated that even though it supports powder and liquid detergents it was designed to work with dishwasher tabs so that’s what they recommend.

    I can’t help but wonder if people buy a new dishwasher–made for a completely different kind of cleaning substance–then continue their old (powder) ways and wonder why it doesn’t work as well as the old one.

    Note: My Bosch dishwasher’s manual had notes in it about powder like, “if you’re going to use powder don’t use the ‘Auto’ mode…” and instead you should follow their instructions in regards to things like pre-rinse and how long you should wait before running the dishwasher (like, with powder I think the goal was to make sure everything stays wet before starting but I forget).