5 ms·
I've been trying to secure investigative journalists for about a year and a half, and this article kind of covers two of the points that I make on all of the se
by r3bl 10y ago
I've been trying to secure investigative journalists for about a year and a half, and this article kind of covers two of the points that I make on all of the security trainings. They usually go like this:
* Do not have work-related emails on your Android (unless it's Google-made). iOS (9+) is okay.
* Do not open random attachments on a Windows machine. (We always do our best to convince them to switch to a Ubuntu station with an AppArmor profile for LibreOffice set.)
This is a good start. I think this article would be even better if it included some phishing tips (like HTTPS doesn't automatically mean "secure", and if you're suddenly logged out of Google for no apparent reason, don't just log into the webpage displayed to you, but instead, open Google by typing the address bar manually and log in there).
Interesting side-note: Asshats spend days crafting phishing emails specifically targeted to our journalists, and they never get Google's postal address right in the footer.
- tptacek 10y agoI'm not sure I understand how switching someone from Windows+Office to Ubuntu+LibreOffice is a security win. LibreOffice is not an especially safe piece of software.
- bumblebeard 10y agoI imagine AppArmor is configured to minimize the access that LibreOffice has to the rest of the system. Otherwise yeah, vanilla LO is probably not any better than MS Office. VServer or similar could also work well but might be harder to configure correctly.
- tptacek 10y agoIf 90+% of a journalist's job is to open documents from sources in an office program, what good does it do to cage exploits in to LibreOffice? Those exploits still get virtually all the data an attacker wants from the journalist.
- bumblebeard 10y agoThe data still has to get out though. If LibreOffice doesn't have network access then that can't happen, at least not without an attack on some other systems as well. This protects against generic sort of "drive-by" attacks but if someone is being targeted then yeah, sandboxing the office suite isn't enough.
- hannob 10y agoI hope I'm not saying anything wrong here, but from what I'm aware there are two major problems with MS Office that LibreOffice doesn't have: * It doesn't have all that macro bundling stuff in normal documents that's the source of the whole macrovirus issue. * It doesn't have any OLE-object-can-run-embedded-EXE-files-on-click-feature. I'd say that's a huge win.
- tptacek 10y agoIt takes seconds to turn macros off in Office, far less time than it takes to convert someone to LibreOffice. Meanwhile, straightforward fuzzing is still producing RCEs in LibreOffice.
- ryuuchin 10y agoThe AppArmor profile provided by Ubuntu/Distro is likely not going to be very restrictive. Also modern versions of Office already run in a sandbox on Windows (AppContainer?) so how much are you really gaining?