4 ms·
A Bitcoin private key is 32 bytes long. /etc/shadow on my machine is 1080 bytes long. Heck, my entire password manager database is probably no more than a few K
by nneonneo 4y ago
A Bitcoin private key is 32 bytes long. /etc/shadow on my machine is 1080 bytes long. Heck, my entire password manager database is probably no more than a few KB in size.
Sure, chasing the necessary pointers and data structures through the kernel or other user programs might add some overhead, but don't write off a 200b/s leak as harmless. It may well be enough to steal the secrets you care about the most.
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- shepherdjerred 4y agoThis is a great case for developers using Electron. Nobody is every going to get anything meaningful from those apps at 219b/s -- there's far too much memory to read!
- keyle 4y agoI think you're mixing things up. The valuable data isn't related to the load time of an application into memory.
- RandomThrow321 4y agoThe joke was that there would be more memory to sift through.
- Blahah 4y ago
- na85 4y agoHey as long as we all agree Electron sucks, amirite
- IntelMiner 4y agoHow dare people make jokes I don't personally find funny!
- coconut08 4y agoYou need to mellow out.
- labster 4y agoIf you want to substantiate the jab, just go run literally any Electron app.
- kelnos 4y agoI didn't find the joke particularly funny, but how is it unsubstantiated that Electron apps use a lot of memory? That seems to be a pretty easy thing to check, and see that a fairly simple Electron app... uses a lot of memory.
- weberer 4y agoIt's a joke whether you found it funny or not. Using scare quotes like that doesn't mean anything.
- mcronce 4y agoGood point. I'm going to start allocating tens of megabytes of random data all over my address space at the beginning of execution so that I too can gain this advantage :)
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y agoMy leg, hand it back, sir. ;-)
- caeril 4y agoYou joke, but allocating and writing random data all over the heap and hiding and constantly moving key material through it is the idea behind Schneier's Boojum.
- bredren 4y agoI searched for this term, "Schneier's Boojum" and the results suggest clearly this is Bruce Schneier you're referring to. But I'm not seeing this Boojum as a concept explained in quick results, actually, one of your prior comments mentioning it is top result. [1] Would you please explain what you mean by Boojum / link to what you're referring to? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27941909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27941909
- josephg 4y agoI don’t care about my /etc/shadow since my machine isn’t network accessible. I’m much more worried about: - The login cookies I have for my email account, my bank or my GitHub account - My password vault - My ssh private keys - which could be used to mess with production systems or make changes to repositories on GitHub without my knowledge All of this data is extremely small (handfuls of bytes) and could cause lots of harm. Giving malicious javascript the power to exfiltrate any of these secrets would be a disaster.
- seanhunter 4y agoThis is a very interesting insight. The vast majority of traditional unix security mitigations are about securing a multi-user system from malicious users. However a lot of the most frightening threat models now are about using data from a single-user system to hijack session tokens or other secrets and thereby compromise external systems that it has some sort of trust relationship with. That's why you see spearphishing attacks that compromise the clipboard - they are hoping that a useful secret gets copied from a password manager or similar. You don't need to elevate priviledge on the local machine if all the secrets are owned by the user you have compromised, and all these secrets are very small numbers of bytes because they are designed to go into a challenge response type flow.
- josephg 4y agoYep. The Unix security model feels out of date these days. Who cares about privilege escalation attacks when all my most sensitive data (ssh keys, browser cookies and saved passwords, code repositories, etc) is already readable by every program I run in my user account? Desktop computing needs application sandboxing like phones have. I find it remarkable that nobody in the opensource world seems to care about this problem.
- EricE 4y agoI think people care, just not enough to deal with the huge PITA that sandboxing turns out to be. It takes a significant amount of discipline - and meticulous detail - to start going down the sandboxing path. In other words, it's tedious and not fun at all.