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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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Privacy
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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.
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.