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I'll just chuck this old blog post of mine out there: https://grepular.com/Protecting_a_Laptop_from_Simple_and_Sophisticated_Attacks https://grepular.com/Prote

I'll just chuck this old blog post of mine out there: https://grepular.com/Protecting_a_Laptop_from_Simple_and_Sophisticated_Attacks https://grepular.com/Protecting_a_Laptop_from_Simple_and_Sop... Specifically, the "Securing the Web browser" section. [edit] Also worth mentioning is the stuff about smartcards on that blog post. You can steal my ~/.ssh/ and my ~/.gnupg/, but because I'm using a smartcard, it wont do you any good.

jacquesm 11y ago
Good stuff, suggest you add an entry about running the browser inside a VM of its own.
reirob 11y ago
Thanks for posting! I bookmarked the page and will use it when setting up my next laptop.
pmoriarty 11y ago
That's a great post. Very thorough. However, a couple of observations concerning some security issues you might not be aware of: First, X itself is very insecure, so by allowing your web browser to share the same X server as the rest of your apps, you are making the rest of your apps more vulnerable. Second, the so-called "Trusted" Platform Module you're using for extra entropy may itself not be very trustable, despite the name. So you may want to rethink that. Finally, according to the vendor of the GPG smartcard you're using, "the software on this card is not available as free software due to NDAs required for certain parts." That there are NDAs on parts of the card or the software (it's not clear which) makes the card suspect, and I don't see where I can get the source of the code (free or not) that's running on the card. An ideal smart card would, like gpg itself, have completely open and transparent hardware and software. I'm not sure if any of those kinds of cards exist, however. That said, I'm sure all the security measures you're taking in sum make you far better off than the typical computer user, but there's room for improvement.
- mike-cardwell 11y ago
  Re X being insecure. Yep. People have brought this up in the comments of the blog post. It doesn't reduce security by shifting it to a different user, and no, it's not as good as running under a VM. However it does give it some extra protection. For example it would have protected your main users ~/.ssh/ and ~/.gnupg/ directories etc that this latest pdf.js vulnerability could have exposed. Re the TPM, even in the worse case scenario where the TPM is totally evil, it can't reduce the randomness on my system. It will either keep it the same or improve it. At least on Linux, where it is just one extra source of entropy on top of the other existing ones. Re the smart card, that may be the case, but it's probably the safest one out there, recommended and pushed by the guy who wrote GnuPG. It's worth noting that the blog post is 4 years old now.

jacquesm 11y ago

Good stuff, suggest you add an entry about running the browser inside a VM of its own.

reirob 11y ago

Thanks for posting! I bookmarked the page and will use it when setting up my next laptop.

pmoriarty 11y ago

That's a great post. Very thorough. However, a couple of observations concerning some security issues you might not be aware of: First, X itself is very insecure, so by allowing your web browser to share the same X server as the rest of your apps, you are making the rest of your apps more vulnerable. Second, the so-called "Trusted" Platform Module you're using for extra entropy may itself not be very trustable, despite the name. So you may want to rethink that. Finally, according to the vendor of the GPG smartcard you're using, "the software on this card is not available as free software due to NDAs required for certain parts." That there are NDAs on parts of the card or the software (it's not clear which) makes the card suspect, and I don't see where I can get the source of the code (free or not) that's running on the card. An ideal smart card would, like gpg itself, have completely open and transparent hardware and software. I'm not sure if any of those kinds of cards exist, however. That said, I'm sure all the security measures you're taking in sum make you far better off than the typical computer user, but there's room for improvement.

mike-cardwell 11y ago
Re X being insecure. Yep. People have brought this up in the comments of the blog post. It doesn't reduce security by shifting it to a different user, and no, it's not as good as running under a VM. However it does give it some extra protection. For example it would have protected your main users ~/.ssh/ and ~/.gnupg/ directories etc that this latest pdf.js vulnerability could have exposed. Re the TPM, even in the worse case scenario where the TPM is totally evil, it can't reduce the randomness on my system. It will either keep it the same or improve it. At least on Linux, where it is just one extra source of entropy on top of the other existing ones. Re the smart card, that may be the case, but it's probably the safest one out there, recommended and pushed by the guy who wrote GnuPG. It's worth noting that the blog post is 4 years old now.