Signal is finally tightening its desktop client's security by changing how it stores plain text encryption keys for the data store after downplaying the issue since 2018.
I am not proposing anything actually, I am implying that this change won’t modify the threat model in any substantial way. Your comment implied that it kind of did, requiring root access - which is a slightly different tm, not so much on single user machines…
So my point is that “The data is safe until your user password is safe” is a very tiny change compared to “your data is safe until your device is safe”. There are tons of ways to get the password once you have local access, and what I strongly disagree with is that it requires more work or risk.
A sudo fake prompt requires a 10-lines bash script since you control the shell configuration, for example. And you don’t even need to phish, you can simply create a SUID shell and use “sudo chmod +s shell” to any local configuration or script where the user runs a sudo command, and you are root, or you dump the keyring or…etc.
Likewise, 99.9% of the users don’t run integrity monitoring tools, or monitor and restrict egress access, so these attacks simply won’t be noticed.
So what I am saying is that an encrypted storage is better than a plaintext storage for the key, but if this requires substantial energies from the devs that could have been put on work that substantially improved the security posture, it is a net negative in terms of security (I don’t know if it is the case), and that nobody after this change should feel secure about their signal data in case their device would be compromised.
I am not proposing anything actually, I am implying that this change won’t modify the threat model in any substantial way. Your comment implied that it kind of did, requiring root access - which is a slightly different tm, not so much on single user machines…
So my point is that “The data is safe until your user password is safe” is a very tiny change compared to “your data is safe until your device is safe”. There are tons of ways to get the password once you have local access, and what I strongly disagree with is that it requires more work or risk. A sudo fake prompt requires a 10-lines bash script since you control the shell configuration, for example. And you don’t even need to phish, you can simply create a SUID shell and use “sudo chmod +s shell” to any local configuration or script where the user runs a sudo command, and you are root, or you dump the keyring or…etc. Likewise, 99.9% of the users don’t run integrity monitoring tools, or monitor and restrict egress access, so these attacks simply won’t be noticed.
So what I am saying is that an encrypted storage is better than a plaintext storage for the key, but if this requires substantial energies from the devs that could have been put on work that substantially improved the security posture, it is a net negative in terms of security (I don’t know if it is the case), and that nobody after this change should feel secure about their signal data in case their device would be compromised.