You are telling me this has been going on for almost a decade now, and no one ever noticed ?
So we trust open source apps under the premise that if malicious code gets added to the code, at least one person will notice ? Here it shows that years pass before anyone notices and millions of people’s communications could have been compromised by the world’s most trusted messaging app.
I don’t know which app to trust after this, if any?
Matrix. You can host any version you want, and when you have to update, just do a version diff between you current and latest versions and check yourself.
Why is this a shock? Someone would need to have already compromised your device. Even if it was encrypted with a password they still could install a key logger
It is easier to compromise a device than to try and compromise encrypted communications.
Everyone knew that already tbh
Does anyone know how iMessage handles this on desktop (on Macs) as they (as far as I know) upgraded their encryption recently?
Summary:
- Signal’s desktop app stores encryption keys for chat history in plaintext, making them accessible to any process on the system
- Researchers were able to clone a user’s entire Signal session by copying the local storage directory, allowing them to access the chat history on a separate device
- This issue was previously highlighted in 2018, but Signal has not addressed it, stating that at-rest encryption is not something the desktop app currently provides
- Some argue this is not a major issue for the “average user”, as other apps also have similar security shortcomings, and users concerned about security should take more extreme measures
- However, others believe this is a significant security flaw that undermines Signal’s core promise of end-to-end encryption
- A pull request was made in April 2023 to implement Electron’s safeStorage API to address this problem, but there has been no follow-up from Signal
Thanks ChatGPT.
Oh wow that’s quite a red flag ngl
If your system is compromised to such an extend, it really doesn’t make much difference how the keys are stored at rest.
But my system is not compromised?
Did you read the article?
How do you know?
Because I check my system and I don’t even use Signal?
“checking” does not prevent anything bad from happening. and if that file were read by a malicious actor, it would likely be immediate and you’d never even notice.
Did you see that I said “I don’t use Signal”?
If the keys are accessible to any process, your system doesn’t need to be compromised. All it takes is an App that you”trust” to break that trust and snatch everything up. Meta has already been caught fucking around with other social media apps on device. They even intercepted Snapchat traffic on some users devices in order to collect that data. It could be as simple as you installed WhatsApp and they went and pillaged your Signal files.
All it takes is an App that you”trust” to break that trust
I get what you’re trying to say, but that’s something I’d classify as “compromised” as well.
For sure, just suggesting that “compromised” doesn’t necessarily mean you got hacked by someone because they tricked you into giving a password, or they scraped it from another website, or you installed something sketchy. It could be as simple as Microsoft scans all your files with AI, or Meta snoops other social media (which it has been caught doing).
So you’re saying that the os itself is compromised? Gee, good luck protecting your processes from the fucking os, no matter how you do it.
Why? They would need access to the device
E2EE is not supposed to protect if device get compromised.
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Source:
“The computer” decides when to install updates and which ones to install.
source: 93% of ransomware are windows based
99% of people in France are French
BUT WHAT OF QUEBEC
Are they in france?
Correlation is not causation.
Causation was never stated nor implied
Microsoft are integrating adware and spyware straight into the os.
Source:
Try setup fresh windows 11 system.
I don’t understand how that would prove anything.
A lot of tracker and spyware already mention in setup. And without bypass you cannot setup without microsoft account.
Intrinsically/semantically no but the expectation is that the texts are encrypted at rest and the keys are password and/or tpm+biometric protected. That’s just how this works at this point. Also that’s the government standard for literally everything from handheld devices to satellites (yes, actually).
At this point one of the most likely threat vectors is someone just taking your shit. Things like border crossings, rubber stamped search warrants, cops raid your house because your roommate pissed them off, protests, needing to go home from work near a protest, on and on.
TPM isn’t all that reliable. You will have people upgrading their pc, or windows update updating their bios, or any number of other reasons reset their tpm keys, and currently nothing will happen. In effect people would see Signal completely break and loose all their data, often seemingly for no reason.
Talking to windows or through it to the TPM also seems sketchy.
In the current state of Windows, the sensible choice is to leave hardware-based encryption to the OS in the form of disk encryption, unfortunate as it is. The great number of people who loose data or have to recover their backup disk encryption key from their Microsoft account tells how easily that system is disturbed (And that Microsoft has the decryption keys for your encrypted date).
If your device is turned on and you are logged in, your data is no longer at rest.
Signal data will be encrypted if your disk is also encrypted.
If your device’s storage is not encrypted, and you don’t have any type of verified boot process, then thats on you, not Signal.
That’s not how this works.
If the stored data from signal is encrypted and the keys are not protected than that is the security risk that can be mitigated using common tools that every operating system provides.
You’re defending signal from a point of ignorance. This is a textbook risk just waiting for a series of latent failures to allow leaks or access to your “private” messages.
There are many ways attackers can dump files without actually having privileged access to write to or read from memory. However, that’s a moot point as neither you nor I are capable of enumerating all potential attack vectors and risks. So instead of waiting for a known failure to happen because you are personally “confident” in your level of technological omnipotence, we should instead not be so blatantly arrogant and fill the hole waiting to be used.
Also this is a common problem with framework provided solutions:
https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/api/safe-storage
This is such a common problem that it has been abstracted into apis for most major desktop frameworks. And every major operating system provides a key ring like service for this purpose.
Because this is a common hole in your security model.
Having Signal fill in gaps for what the OS should be protecting is just going to stretch Signal more than it already does. I would agree that if Signal can properly support that kind of protection on EVERY OS that its built for, go for it. But this should be an OS level protection that can be offered to Signal as an app, not the other way around.
Having Signal fill in gaps for what the OS should be protecting is just going to stretch Signal more than it already does. I would agree that if Signal can properly support that kind of protection on EVERY OS that its built for, go for it. But this should be an OS level protection that can be offered to Signal as an app, not the other way around.
Damn reading literacy has gone downhill these days.
Please reread my post.
But this should be an OS level protection that can be offered to Signal as an app, not the other way around.
- OSs provide keyring features already
- The framework signal uses (electron) has a built in API for this EXACT NEED
Cmon, you can do better than this, this is just embarrassing.
Signal data will be encrypted if your disk is also encrypted.
True.
and you don’t have any type of verified boot process
How motherboard refusing to boot from another drive would protect anything?
Its more about protecting your boot process from malware.
Well, yes. By refusing to boot. It can’t do anything if motherboard is replaced.
Thats correct. Thats one of the many perks.
EDIT: s/do anything/prevent booting/
Indeed, End-to-End Encryption protects data between those ends, not ends themselves. If ends are compromised, no math will help you.
Plaintext should never be used in any application that deals with security, ever.
It doesn’t use plain text. It is end to end encrypted but that isn’t what this “issue” is
Oh no, tell that to SSH.
unless you’re reading ciphertext yourself, this doesn’t make sense
Mfw end to end can be compromised at the end.
That said, they should fix this anyway
Whatever its stores and however it stores it doesn’t matter to me: I moved its storage space to my ~/.Private encrypted directory. Same thing for my browser: I don’t use a master password or rely on its encryption because I set it up so it too saves my profile in the ~/.Private directory.
See here for more information. You can essentially secure any data saved by any app with eCryptfs - at least when you’re logged out.
Linux-only of course. In Windows… well, Windows.
Or ext4 encrytion. Which is overpowered. You can have different keys for different files and directories.
The real problem is that the security model for apps on mobile is much better than that for apps on desktop. Desktop apps should all have private storage that no other non-root app can access. And while we’re at it, they should have to ask permission before activating the mic or camera.
Firejail and bwrap. Flatpaks. There are already ways to do this, but I only know of one distro that separates apps by default like Android does (separate user per app), which is the brand new “EasyOS”.
They do sort of with Flatpak
macOS has nailed it*, even though it’s still not as good as iOS or Android, but leagues and bounds better than Windows and especially Linux.
ETC: *sandboxing/permission system
What’s wrong with the Flatpak permissions system on Linux?
It’s a joke. Apps have defined permissions already allowed on install and some of them have too many things set to allow like home or host access. Also, changing any permission requires restarting the app. It’s heading in the right direction, but it has a looooong way to go to catch up with macOS, let alone Android and iOS.
What does Windows do? Genuine question, I’ve not used it since the 7 days. Regarding Linux, that’s true for stuff installed through regular package managers and whatnot, but Flatpak is pushing a more sandboxed and permission oriented system, akin to Android.
You have granular control over universal windows apps (ie windows 8+ apps) and one global lock over all desktop apps (non uwp), and one global lock over everything. It’s pretty solid considering how little control Microsoft has and it’s wonderful fetish for compatibility.
Tldr basically same as Linux, except app distribution in Linux was bad enough for so long that more stuff is in the new restricted format while windows still has tons of things which will never go away and aren’t in the sandbox. I think not finding a way to sandbox all desktop apps was a mistake.
While it would certainly be nice to see this addressed, I don’t recall Signal ever claiming their desktop app provided encryption at rest. I would also think that anyone worried about that level of privacy would be using disappearing messages and/or regularly wiping their history.
That said, this is just one of the many reasons why whole disk encryption should be the default for all mainstream operating systems today, and why per-app permissions and storage are increasingly important too.
Does encrypting your disks change something for the end user in day to day usage? I’m honest, I’ve never used encrypted disks in my life.
It depends on how you set it up. I think the default in some cases (like Windows Bitlocker) is to store the key in TPM, so everything becomes transparent to the user at that point, although many disagree with this method for privacy/security reasons.
The other method is to provide a password or keyfile during bootup, which does change something for the end user somewhat.
No, the average user will never know the difference. I couldn’t tell you exactly what the current performance impact is for hardware encryption, but it’s likely around 1-4% depending on the platform (I use LUKS under Linux).
For gamers, it’s likely a 1-5 FPS loss, depending on your hardware, which is negligible in my experience. I play mostly first and third person shooter-style games at 1440p/120hz, targeting 60-90 FPS, and there’s no noticeable impact (Ryzen 5600 / RX 6800XT).
If it has to go to disk for immediate loading of assets while playing a video game you’re losing more than 1-5 fps
Maybe, but not every frame while you’re playing. No game is loading gigs of data every frame. That would be the only way most encryption algorithms would slow you down.
You’re more likely going to get stuttering or asset streaming issues which are going to have more impact than losing a few fps.
Yeah, I’m sure there are a lot of variables there. I can only say that in my experience, I noticed zero impact to gaming performance when I started encrypting everything about 10 years ago. No stuttering or noticeable frame loss. It was a seamless experience and brings real peace of mind knowing that our financial info, photos, and other sensitive files are safely locked away.
For gamers, it’s likely a 1-5 FPS loss
I highly doubt it… would love to see some hard data on that. Most algorithms used for disk encryption these days are already faster than RAM, and most games are not reading gigabytes/sec from the disk every frame during gameplay for this to ever matter.
It’s transparent for end user basically, but protects the laptop at least when outside and if someone steals the computer. As long as it was properly shutdown.
Define properly shut down. Do your thieves usually ask first?
I think they’re just referring to an outdated concept of OSes with non-journaling filesystems that can cause data corruption if the disk is shut off abruptly, which in theory could corrupt the entire disk at once if it was encrypted at a device level. But FDE was never used in the time of such filesystems anyways.
If you suspend the laptop when moving locations instead of shutting down or hibernating to disk then disk encryption is useless.
Most operating systems will require your desktop password upon resume, and most thieves are low-functioning drug users who are not about to go Hacker Man on your laptop. They will most likely just wipe the system and install something else; if they can even figure that out.
Whole disk encryption wouldn’t change your daily usage, no. It just means that when you boot your PC you have to enter your passphrase. And if your device becomes unbootable for whatever reason, and you want to access your drive, you’ll just have to decrypt it first to be able to read it/write to it, e.g. if you want to rescue files from a bricked computer. But there’s no reason not to encrypt your drive. I can’t think of any downsides.
If any part of the data gets corrupted you lose the whole thing. Recovery tools can’t work with partially corrupted encrypted data.
I don’t think that’s a big deal with Signal data. You can log back into your account, you’d just lose your messages. idk how most people use Signal but I have disappearing messages on for everything anyway, and if a message is that important to you then back it up.
I don’t recall Signal ever claiming their desktop app provided encryption at rest.
I’m not sure if they’ve claimed that, but it does that using SQLCipher.
Exactly.
I’ll admit to being lazy and not enabling encryption on my Windows laptops. But if I deployed something for someone, it would be encrypted.
Full disk encryption doesn’t help with this threat model at all. A rogue program running on the same machine can still access all the files.
It does help greatly in general though, because all of your data will be encrypted when the device is at rest. Theft and B&Es will no longer present a risk to your privacy.
Per-app permissions address this specific threat model directly. Containerized apps, such as those provided by Flatpak can ensure that apps remain sandboxed and unable to access data without explicit authorization.
There is just no excuse for not even salting or SOMETHING to keep the secrets out of plaintext. The reason you don’t store in plaintext is because it can lead to even incidental collection. Say you have some software, perhaps spyware, perhaps it’s made by a major corporation so doesn’t get called that and it crawls around and happens to upload a copy of a full or portion of the file containing this info, now it’s been uploaded and compromised potentially not even by a malicious actor successfully gaining access to a machine but by poor practices.
No it can’t stop a sophisticated malware specifically targeting Signal to steal credentials and gain access but it does mean casual malware that hasn’t taken the time out to write a module to do that is out of luck and increases the burden on attackers. No it won’t stop the NSA but it’s still something that it stops someone’s 17 year old niece who knows a little bit about computers but is no malware author from gaining access to your signal messages and account because she could watch a youtube video and follow along with simple tools.
The claims Signal is an op or the runner is under a national security letter order to compromise it look more and more plausible in light of weird bad basic practices like this and their general hostility. I’ll still use it and it’s far from the worst looking thing out there but there’s something unshakably weird about the lead dev, their behavior and practices that can’t be written off as being merely a bit quirky.
for not even salting
Wrong secret
I mean combined with any kind of function, even a trivial kind. A salt derived from some machine state data (a random install id generated on install, a hash of computer name, etc) plus a rot13 or something would still be better than leaving it plaintext.
To encrypt it you would need to store a encryption key
It’s plaintext all the way down.
The irony
The backlash is extremely idiotic. The only two options are to store it in plaintext or to have the user enter the decryption key every time they open it. They opted for the more user-friendly option, and that is perfectly okay.
If you are worried about an outsider extracting it from your computer, then just use full disk encryption. If you are worried about malware, they can just keylog you when you enter the decryption key anyways.
The third option is to use the native secret vault. MacOS has its Keychain, Windows has DPAPI, Linux has has non-standardized options available depending on your distro and setup.
Full disk encryption does not help you against data exfil, it only helps if an attacker gains physical access to your drive without your decryption key (e.g. stolen device or attempt to access it without your presence).
Even assuming that your device is compromised by an attacker, using safer storage mechanisms at least gives you time to react to the attack.
Linux has the secret service API that has been a freedesktop.org standard for 15 years.
Secret service API. Damn. That’s how FSB knows what it knows.
A better thing to be worried about IMO is that Signal contains proprietary code. Also to my knowledge nobody is publicly verifying the supposed “reproducible builds” if they even still exist.
The alternative is safeStorage, which uses the operating system’s credential management facility if available. On Mac OS and sometimes Linux, this means another process running in the user’s account is prevented from accessing it. Windows doesn’t have a protection against that, but all three systems do protect the credentials if someone copies data offline.
Signal should change this, but it isn’t a major security flaw. If an attacker can copy your home directory or run arbitrary code on your device, you’re already in big trouble.
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.
You. Don’t. Store. Secrets. In. Plaintext.
Ok. Enter password at every launch.
You. Don’t. Store. Secrets. In. Plaintext.
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.
If someone gets access they can delete your keys, or set up something that can intercept your keys in other ways.
The security of data at rest is just one piece of the puzzle. In many systems the access to the data is considered much more important than whether the data itself is encrypted in one particular scenario.
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’.
Come on, 95% of users don’t set passwords on their ssh keys
Where are these stays from lmao.
Counting my friends
You can count me too
SSH has encrypted keys
Kinda expected the SSH key argument. The difference is the average user group.
The average dude with a SSH key that’s used for more than their RPi knows a bit about security, encryption and opsec. They would have a passphrase and/or hardening mechanisms for their system and network in place. They know their risks and potential attack vectors.
The average dude who downloads a desktop app for a messenger that advertises to be secure and E2EE encrypted probably won’t assume that any process might just wire tap their whole “encrypted” communications.
Let’s not forget that the threat model has changed by a lot in the last years, and a lot of effort went into providing additional security measures and best practices. Using a secure credential store, additional encryption and not storing plaintext secrets are a few simple ones of those. And sure, on Linux the SSH key is still a plaintext file. But it’s a deliberate decision of you to keep it as plaintext. You can at least encrypt with a passphrase. You can use the actual working file permission model of Linux and SSH will refuse to use your key with loose permissions. You would do the same on Windows and Mac and use a credential store and an agent to securely store and use your keys.
Just because your SSH key is a plaintext file and the presumption of a secure home dir, you still wouldn’t do a ~/passwords.txt.
All your session cookies are stored in plaintext.
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 them always encrypted at rest, decrypting at the latest possible moment and not storing (decrypted) secrets in-memory for longer than absolutely necessary at use.
How in the fuck are people actually defending signal for this
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.
AFAIK Android encrypts entire fs with one key. And ACL is not encryption.
Popular encrypted messaging app Signal is facing criticism over a security issue in its desktop application.
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.
Been a few days since using electron, but AFAIK electron can’t be used as a wrapper for android apps, or can it? Or is their android app a web app wrapped into a “native” android app too?
Also, since this seems to be an issue since 2018, 6 years should be plenty to rewrite using a native secure storage…
Ah yes, another prime example that demonstrates that Lemmy is no different than Reddit. Everyone thinks they are a professional online.
Nothing sensitive should ever lack encryption especially in the hands of a third party company managing your data claiming you are safe and your privacy is protected.
No one is invincible and it’s okay to criticize the apps we hold to high regards. If your are pissed people are shitting on Signal you should be pissed Signal gave people a reason to shit on them.
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Where are you going to store the encryption key? At the end of the day the local machine is effectively pwded anyway
If your device gets compromised, it’s no longer the company’s problem.
I presume keys are already sort of encrypted?
Nope. Your presumption is wrong.
👍
They could just add a password
Alternative headline: Someone has a feature request for Signal which would be of interest to a few people with very specific security needs.
It’s not a bad feature to ensure that eg if there’s a malicious process running on your computer it can’t send all your signal data to whomever
Needing to enter a secure passphrase each time you want to use signal in exchange for one more fragile layer of defence for that one part of your data in a scenario that would normally mean you’ve already lost unless you’re running a super-secure compartmentalized operating system like qubes or something is probably not worth it for most people.
I already enter a passphrase every time I want to use Signal; I use the Molly client on my phone. It’s really not a big deal. I also enter a passphrase every time I launch my password manager, every time I launch my two-factor authentication app on my phone, and every time I open my email client. I think it’s fairly standard to protect sensitive data on your computer with encryption at rest and to decrypt it upon launching the application that handles the data.
It’s really not a big deal
For most casual users, it is a deal-breaker. And it’s hard to get everyday people to use your software with roadblocks like that.
every time I open my email client.
You must not get email very often, this is absolutely a non-starter for me.
For most casual users, it is a deal-breaker. And it’s hard to get everyday people to use your software with roadblocks like that.
That’s fair enough, but the way the mobile app works is that you can opt in to having encryption at rest with a passphrase, so if you want to leave your signal database unencrypted you can.
You must not get email very often, this is absolutely a non-starter for me.
Once you open it you can leave it open if you need notifications. Sometimes I leave it open, sometimes I just want to check my emails and then close it. Idk, I really think typing in a password for authentication/decryption regularly is such a non-issue, like for instance do you not regularly type in a password when you run a command with sudo? Again, if it’s opt-in I also don’t see the issue, except for the issue of allowing people to not encrypt their Signal data thus potentially compromising the people they’re messaging, but obviously that issue is currently universal for Signal desktop.
This has nothing to do with the mobile app, which also has password/biometric unlocking, it’s about the desktop electron app.
I know. I never said it was about the mobile app?
You did but it says “desktop” right in the page title.
I’m now genuinely not sure what you’re saying. I did what? I said it was about the mobile app? I didn’t say it was about the mobile app?
Huh. I would’ve thought most desktop users just leave it running all day long like I do. Obviously there is the disk encryption passphrase at boot, adding another one for signal would in my case be redundant.
But the point is not only how easy it is to enter a passphrase, but also how much security that actually gains you. I don’t think it does much on the typical desktop, be it windows or linux, where there are so many ways to escalate or persist privilege for anyone that has user-level access.
I would’ve thought most desktop users just leave it running all day long like I do.
They do. OP is not a normal user.
Obviously there is the disk encryption passphrase at boot, adding another one for signal would in my case be redundant.
I also have full disk encryption, but I still have some databases on my disk encrypted because I decrypt my disk when I boot my computer. But yeah if you have Signal open (& its db decrypted) all the time it would probably be minimal. I don’t have Signal open all the time though, only when I want to check messages or am actively using it
I don’t think it does much on the typical desktop, be it windows or linux, where there are so many ways to escalate or persist privilege for anyone that has user-level access.
The point would be encryption, even the root user wouldn’t be able to read encrypted data if they don’t have the passphrase
If you have root, intercepting all the user’s keystrokes is trivial.
You mean the types of people who would use signal to communicate with others?
Bruh windows and linux have a secrets vault (cred manager and keyring respectively, iirc) for this exact purpose.
Even Discord uses it on both OSs no problem
Can we please all just acknowledge that desktop operating systems absolutely suck (in regards to security)?
How is a Desktop OS any different from a mobile one? This is where you need to be more specific.
There are too many differences for me to list here, but unlike mobile operating systems, Windows and most Linux desktops do not provide sandboxed environments for userspace apps by default. Apps generally have free reign over the whole system; reading/writing data from/to other apps without restriction or notification. There are virtually no safeguards against malicious actors.
Mobile operating systems significantly restrict system-level storage space, making key areas read-only to prevent data access or manipulation. They also protect app storage, so one app can’t arbitrarily access or modify data stored for a different app.
Mobile operating systems also follow an image-based update model, wherein updates are atomic. System software updates are generally applied successfully all at once or not at all, helping to ensure your phone is never left in a partial or unusable state after a system update.
For desktop users, macOS, and atomic Linux distros combined with Flatpak are the closest comparisons.
