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> If you find yourself ever crafting a security solution where public keys somehow need to be private or secret, go back to the drawing board or reach out to so
by numair 5y ago
> If you find yourself ever crafting a security solution where public keys somehow need to be private or secret, go back to the drawing board or reach out to someone with serious expertise.
I know you’re taking the “strict teacher” approach with your comment, but you’re totally wrong. And the reason you’re wrong is, security doesn’t equal privacy. But for the “average person,” security does equal privacy, or should, so they find systems that could potentially expose their identity to be “insecure.”
In this particular case, there have been past examples of using keys to fingerprint users without their consent. Yes, it’s been super edge-case and proof-of-concept, but for a lot of people — and perhaps more importantly, in a lot of jurisdictions — leaving a personal identifier sitting around like this (without ever informing the user!) is the very opposite of a best practice.
The end result is, you should only have a key on GitHub that isn’t used anywhere else. That’s what I do, and I’m sure lots of us on this comment thread do, but there’s definitely lots of My First Coding Bootcamp people who were guided through their GitHub account installations who might not have been aware that these are keys that shouldn’t be reused elsewhere.
I would have a very different view on this if GitHub had been explicit about the use of registered keys for other services. That’s a GREAT concept, but I’m not going to trust a company with that business when they’ve just backdoored themselves into it without asking for permission. And the problem for them is, in this particular situation you need the weird paranoid privacy crowd on your side for it to work.
- Gargyle 5y agoThe crowd that needs privacy is also the most high stakes and vulnerable crowd. They are the people that may save civil society with a structure built by thousands of small stones. Dismissing concern in that area is inherently giving tyrants and aspiring ones power.
- numair 5y agoYou’re clearly super well-informed about this problem space. I’d like to talk to you about this a bit more, if you’re up for it — shoot me an email (it’s in my HN bio).
- Gargyle 5y agoIs that sarcasm?
- numair 5y agoNot at all! You’ve covered all of the major threat vectors that others would dismiss or not know about. You’ve got true expertise in this area, my friend.
- Gargyle 5y agoI am just wary of flattery and "my friend". I am not especially suspicious of your motives but we don't know each other yet. If you want to have an interesting conversation with me I am positive to do that pseudonymously. Maybe leave me a pubkey here
- numair 5y agossh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQCalPlcbQUWX5caNedbKuWxAOUG+wFU2jtPUXmAcUDTIUgNz9JeW7cOAH1FPAcouIBM/0e48hdswSB2XHR0yHj3HvGx2KfB1lsd+FxXRR+dGPzO3WiMHXHdKogmHilk9U1ztwEFoZAkXuxvykv+Sn16j/xHXgFHdx5IDl/jyT5/IEIZHiePQqPYgptea/kXDiQGClMcT5V1bczCQH5tIcXdSKHhXn3oV1IAd79FpznmeCMALsyS4MUeU7uSx32PknIpgev64aMFgZItJUanqaeABuc9mcGNgHLBhBdO+gCOwBnwd+7boKmRawvMnEwsoznN9elr4FeBB81mBRnc6Q53 numair
- Gargyle 5y ago(Don't expect realtime/neartime messages. I'll write whenever I feel like it.) ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQCssSd91viJEmUQNx28L6JifYcGwTNEkLnmvZvdNxWxdTCrKwPEBVdlLooN90QugL/mJVwcWj9qsnOLbcoVaJlqMppY8UYlHP6OnGwKRGkpPdbKHnBA+Rrg7r8GUwdLW/PvI8DWhEPXzzWvrCNiESJWVdSCT2bTfAA3CQuPnL9cr5hcpw0i1jf7PBXRiVw2E2133KhEr91xNMH/jXh4jrly3J+kmBEmJcrkHNrHj0O8Ml+PmVQknq+tYT1DivnE2dxHoMkfdP0xP9yV9s0+7/JhU+tnXJ2+kaIOSpOOmhBPyjNYO6wkNvQh3aYzKrtcoOWPO2y56sfw9Uqlbpyr1ZU1 Gargyle
- laumars 5y agoIf you need privacy then you shouldn’t be uploading to GitHub in the first place. The moment you do that you’re publishing email addresses, other projects that you contribute too and potentially leaking your timezone by virtue of commit times. Your SSH public key is really the least of your identifiable information you’d be worried about because that’s the easiest to create a unique key for GitHub.
- Gargyle 5y agoIts actually the same thing. A shared identifier. Of course email is another thing to separate for separate identities. But it is way more widely known that email adresses are used ad an unique identifier.
- laumars 5y agoThat’s my point though. If you’re concerned about privacy enough that even a throwaway SSH public key is sensitive then GitHub (and even any public git repository) is going to be a bad idea because they’re going to be leaking far more identifiable data than just your SSH public key. If you agree that said platforms leak lots of other identifiable data (which you seam to) then thus it is a fair statement to say GitHub hiding public keys do little to enhance your privacy. And thus one can reasonably conclude that privacy argument doesn’t really hold with regards to SSH keys. I’m happy to agree that it’s bad UX and probably should be advertised better so people are aware they should follow the (in my opinion best practice) of using a unique SSH key for GitHub.
- Gargyle 5y agoYou might have gotten me having this too narrow to be broadly useful. Because we were already arguing about a detail and I concentrate just on this detail, not a general github privacy overview. The whole intention was to raise attention to a less often mentioned part of the information github exposes about accounts.
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- iJohnDoe 5y agoGreat comment and a huge important point people should be aware of. Related, VPN users can easily be fingerprinted if they are assigned unique certificates for each account.