10 ms·
It sounds very hipster and all, but how is a phone more trustworthy than a Linux PC? Cool, we don't need to trust a PC, now we have to trust a phone and pretend
by shmel 9y ago
It sounds very hipster and all, but how is a phone more trustworthy than a Linux PC? Cool, we don't need to trust a PC, now we have to trust a phone and pretend that malware for smartphones don't exist at all. Hardware USB token looks much better as its attack surface is so much smaller than iOS/Android.
- 4kevinking 9y agoThe attack surface may seem smaller for USB tokens, but storing the pin for say a Yubikey allows malware to use the key without restriction. Also, these USB devices don't have a UI, so you never know what you are actually approving, i.e. which username or server you are logging into.
- packetized 9y agoErm, not true - changing the Yubikey setting to require a touch for key use (S/C/E) is trivial. Malware can't use it without restriction if it requires you to physically touch it every time you want to approve use.
- 4kevinking 9y agoPoint taken. Unfortunately when you touch the key you still can't verify exactly what you are approving.
- simonvc 9y agoThere's a GPG/SSH applet for the ledger Nano S now that has a tiny screen and buttons...
- wwwv 9y agoSo, capture the auth and use it for the malware, show the user some failure and allow their retry to pass. Stupid dodgy Yubikey fails half the time.
- tptacek 9y ago* Every application on the phone is sandboxed. * The disk is encrypted by default, and the OS is aggressive about keeping it encrypted; a booted-up computer is almost always decrypted. * The language runtimes on the phone are hardened. * The phone's kernel, in addition to being more important attack surface than the Linux kernel (because of the jailbreak market, among other things), is auto-updated. * The phone's users, at least on secure phones, are never superuser. * Virtually all of the shell command attack surface is gone, since you can only install apps through the one app-install interface approved by the phone vendor. I could go on, and I'm probably missing a big one. Phones are more secure than "computers". They kind of have to be: their OS design benefits from 2 decades of security architecture lessons learned. I use a Y4 for some of my SSH keys, but it's a gigantic pain in the ass, and one that Egor Homakov is not entirely wrong about calling a marginal bit of security theater (whoever owned up your computer also owned up your ssh binary). It's true that the phone software token doesn't fix that, but it also doesn't cost anything.
- plange 9y agoYou are completely right up to the point that people are able to update their phones.
- tptacek 9y agoIf you want to add the proviso that this is true only for iPhones, that's fine, but I wasn't looking for that particular message board slapfight.
- stcredzero 9y ago"owned up" -- Our language has evolved again! (I only comment because I find this genuinely interesting, this mutation evidently coming from the security subset of the tech world.) ("Traditional" meaning, "to admit to": http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/own-up http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/own-up)
- dv_dt 9y agoI thought the big fundamental vulnerability was that many baseband processors operating the phone's radio has dma to the memory of the entire device.