5 ms·

Allowing a user to add system certificates a good thing. The user owns the device.

shadowgovt 3y ago
Everything in the category "the user owns the device" is tricky. For a lot of users, "It's really hard to break" is a value-add. Every capacity the user has to modify permissions is an opportunity for an attacker to compromise a device. You can see an example of this in web browsers these days, where sites have to `log` a big scary "Don't paste anything someone tells you to paste into here" message into the built-in developer tools because no matter how many safety features get added to the browser security model, the dev tools can bypass them. It is definitely important that the purchaser knows what kind of phone they're getting (whether it's easy or hard to crack open all the layers of its protection model), but "The phone's protection model is easily broken by the owner" as a universal absolute applied to all devices should be considered harmful.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  How do you make something that isn't trivially turned to oppression without allowing users a trivial escape from the devices protection model? Isn't installing your own OS on your general purpose computer a trivial out? Shall we likewise disable that ability on all general purpose computers?
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    Sometimes oppression could come from a central authority, and sometimes it can come from a rampant criminal element taking advantage of exploitable human behavior. We have to balance defending against both. > Shall we likewise disable that ability Not on all computers, no. But I should have the option of buying my grandmother one which is very, very hard for someone to convince her to give them admin rights.
    - michaelmrose 3y ago
      This use case is well served by a non admin user as opposed to a machine where Dell is the root user. Furthermore what you desire for your grandmother is liable to be imposed on the rest of us if we want the privilege of banking or Netflix and in many cases grossly abused especially in less free countries including ours should we in the US fall into fascism. You would build chains for millions of people so that granny will have to give scammers her money some less convenient way. I'd rather not.
      - shadowgovt 3y ago
        I think that really overstates the risk scenario. If we're going to descend into hyperbole, let's turn it around... If a free and open device is so important, won't some smart hacker always come along to build one? I'd rather my grandmother have an easy life and trust that Neo will be around to save the technorati eventually than make life easier on people who already know how to hack things they want to behave differently at the cost of my grandmother's sense of ease and well-being.
        michaelmrose 3y ago
        > If a free and open device is so important, won't some smart hacker always come along to build one? This just isn't how the universe works at all. We both grew up in the era roughly analogous to the early era of flight with 100 bad designs competing for most incompetent and are now moving into the an era of commercial jets and here you are arguing that planes wont make a difference in war. If you build an ecosystem where essential services like logging into your work, watching netflix, and banking require you to use locked down devices in which the OEM could be forced to build ANY restriction into the device but mostly use it to keep you from trivialities in the US and Europe you wont notice you've built a tool suitable for any oppression nor will you notice until the frog is well boiled. We have the bones of damn near total control in terms of difficult to root devices, remote attestation to ensure you actually are using such a device, AI to analyze data at scale. The difference between the tools we have now and 1984 is that the telescreen didn't sit in your pocket nor was Big Brother literally listening 100% of the time to 100% of the people. We are describing a literal system you could roll out without inventing anything purely based on existing technology and if you too live in the US then we are doing so in a country that has at least a 1 in 3 chance of descending into a fascist state.
  - ori_b 3y ago
    > Shall we likewise disable that ability on all general purpose computers? It's being worked on with web attestation.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    Apple honestly did a pretty good job. You can sideload your own code with a free developer account, but you have to jump through some minor hoops to get “developer” mode set on your account (I went through this to get the tvOS 17 beta). And the app signing expires in 7 days, so it’s really painful for a normal user who isn’t actually developing and testing an app to use like that for a long term thing. If you want more than that, you can pay $99 for a real developer account and that will let you sign apps for up to a year. And that’s a sufficient barrier that Facebook can’t be like “you have to sign up for a dev account if you want to use Facebook!” and expect the average user to just blindly comply. Cause that’s the problem with the EU approach, it works ok when it’s only the EU, but Facebook really wants to bypass those permissions (they’ve already bribed users to install dev credential builds that have full permissions, so they could datamine more effectively), and the moment they can lever open the app-review process with “third party app stores” is the moment the “doesn’t work on iOS, please sideload the native app” banner goes up on Facebook.com. It doesn’t have to be financial but the only alternatives would be some kind of credential verification thing like looking at your LinkedIn or a college transcript or a GitHub account to validate that you’re actually a bona fide developer and not just grandma who got an iTunes gift card to install the spyware build (real example from Facebook). https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/apple-bans-facebook-vpn/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/apple-bans-facebook-vpn/am...
    - JimDabell 3y ago
      > Apple honestly did a pretty good job. They did. Over here, there are regular news articles and warnings from the government as yet more Android users get conned into installing fake banking app APKs that let attackers steal all their money. It’s always the same news article and the same warning – only Android users affected. Elsewhere in this thread, people are saying that you can’t protect people from themselves… but Apple seem to be doing a good job of it. When was the last time a side-loaded IPA stole bank credentials from iPhone users? I personally think that Apple should be a little more open. Having some sort of developer mode with plenty of warnings would be better. But the idea that Apple’s approach doesn’t improve security in meaningful ways to the average user is wishful thinking based more in ideology than what actually happens in the real world.
- amalcon 3y ago
  "Easily, but there's a big scary warning that the person asking you to do this might be trying to hack you" is still "easily". That obviously seems more consumer friendly than either extreme.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    Those warnings only go so far against a talented social engineer.
    - 3np 3y ago
      At some point, you can not protect people from themselves.
- Spivak 3y ago
  I don't think you deserve the downvotes, this is exactly right and is incredibly frustrating. Programmers, and increasingly folks who don't consider themselves to be writing malware, have no concept of a thing that should never be done by an application and only by the end user. If it's possible to do I should be allowed to do it! If they didn't want me doing it they should have stopped me! The amount of guides on the internet not targeted toward developers that teach users to go through the "create an application" flow and grant some random app access to their account in a more privileged way than would be allowed by the app itself is embarrassing for our industry. "Just add this configuration profile!", "Just paste in your API key." The moment you allow users to add custom root certs ad blocker apps are going to ask users to add one for "advanced" network level ad blocking. You can't win with this crap. Nobody considers themselves a "not advanced" user so no amount of warning will ever work. Have you ever tried doing something, saw some warning that said this was for advanced users in your way to do the thing, and stopped? Me neither.
- loa_in_ 3y ago
  > sites have to `log` a big scary "Don't paste anything someone tells you to paste into here" message into the built-in developer tools because no matter how many safety features get added to the browser security model, the dev tools can bypass them. That doesn't seem all that much work. Hardening things like that should be a dedicated job, but of course it doesn't "create value" so it's mostly left to rot until it's a source of bad PR.
- inetknght 3y ago
  > For a lot of users, "It's really hard to break" is a value-add. "It's really hard to break" should not be conducive to the dumbing down of the populace. Enabling power users is therefore more desirable. And importantly, the two do not have to be mutually exclusive.
  - simondotau 3y ago
    I agree with you in theory, but in practice half the population are never going to become security experts and it's impractical to force them to learn through necessity. If a hacker can get root on your smartphone, they can probably get access to your bank account (and the 2FA), your email, your private/intimate photos, your medical issues, your sexual secrets, and so on. A smartphone is far higher stakes than anything else which has come before it. To be clear, I think our right to have a smartphone we control is an absolute. It's extremely important. I would march on the street to protect that right. But I'm equally protective of my right to have a smartphone I cannot control no matter what button I press. I'm glad for devices like the iPhone where the manufacturer works damn hard to make sure that it's always under the manufacturer's control.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I agree with your first sentence. The second seems to get less and less true all the time.
- userbinator 3y ago
  The former is a necessary condition of the latter.

Everything in the category "the user owns the device" is tricky. For a lot of users, "It's really hard to break" is a value-add. Every capacity the user has to modify permissions is an opportunity for an attacker to compromise a device. You can see an example of this in web browsers these days, where sites have to `log` a big scary "Don't paste anything someone tells you to paste into here" message into the built-in developer tools because no matter how many safety features get added to the browser security model, the dev tools can bypass them. It is definitely important that the purchaser knows what kind of phone they're getting (whether it's easy or hard to crack open all the layers of its protection model), but "The phone's protection model is easily broken by the owner" as a universal absolute applied to all devices should be considered harmful.

michaelmrose 3y ago
How do you make something that isn't trivially turned to oppression without allowing users a trivial escape from the devices protection model? Isn't installing your own OS on your general purpose computer a trivial out? Shall we likewise disable that ability on all general purpose computers?
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  Sometimes oppression could come from a central authority, and sometimes it can come from a rampant criminal element taking advantage of exploitable human behavior. We have to balance defending against both. > Shall we likewise disable that ability Not on all computers, no. But I should have the option of buying my grandmother one which is very, very hard for someone to convince her to give them admin rights.
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    This use case is well served by a non admin user as opposed to a machine where Dell is the root user. Furthermore what you desire for your grandmother is liable to be imposed on the rest of us if we want the privilege of banking or Netflix and in many cases grossly abused especially in less free countries including ours should we in the US fall into fascism. You would build chains for millions of people so that granny will have to give scammers her money some less convenient way. I'd rather not.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      I think that really overstates the risk scenario. If we're going to descend into hyperbole, let's turn it around... If a free and open device is so important, won't some smart hacker always come along to build one? I'd rather my grandmother have an easy life and trust that Neo will be around to save the technorati eventually than make life easier on people who already know how to hack things they want to behave differently at the cost of my grandmother's sense of ease and well-being.
      - michaelmrose 3y ago
        > If a free and open device is so important, won't some smart hacker always come along to build one? This just isn't how the universe works at all. We both grew up in the era roughly analogous to the early era of flight with 100 bad designs competing for most incompetent and are now moving into the an era of commercial jets and here you are arguing that planes wont make a difference in war. If you build an ecosystem where essential services like logging into your work, watching netflix, and banking require you to use locked down devices in which the OEM could be forced to build ANY restriction into the device but mostly use it to keep you from trivialities in the US and Europe you wont notice you've built a tool suitable for any oppression nor will you notice until the frog is well boiled. We have the bones of damn near total control in terms of difficult to root devices, remote attestation to ensure you actually are using such a device, AI to analyze data at scale. The difference between the tools we have now and 1984 is that the telescreen didn't sit in your pocket nor was Big Brother literally listening 100% of the time to 100% of the people. We are describing a literal system you could roll out without inventing anything purely based on existing technology and if you too live in the US then we are doing so in a country that has at least a 1 in 3 chance of descending into a fascist state.
- ori_b 3y ago
  > Shall we likewise disable that ability on all general purpose computers? It's being worked on with web attestation.
- paulmd 3y ago
  Apple honestly did a pretty good job. You can sideload your own code with a free developer account, but you have to jump through some minor hoops to get “developer” mode set on your account (I went through this to get the tvOS 17 beta). And the app signing expires in 7 days, so it’s really painful for a normal user who isn’t actually developing and testing an app to use like that for a long term thing. If you want more than that, you can pay $99 for a real developer account and that will let you sign apps for up to a year. And that’s a sufficient barrier that Facebook can’t be like “you have to sign up for a dev account if you want to use Facebook!” and expect the average user to just blindly comply. Cause that’s the problem with the EU approach, it works ok when it’s only the EU, but Facebook really wants to bypass those permissions (they’ve already bribed users to install dev credential builds that have full permissions, so they could datamine more effectively), and the moment they can lever open the app-review process with “third party app stores” is the moment the “doesn’t work on iOS, please sideload the native app” banner goes up on Facebook.com. It doesn’t have to be financial but the only alternatives would be some kind of credential verification thing like looking at your LinkedIn or a college transcript or a GitHub account to validate that you’re actually a bona fide developer and not just grandma who got an iTunes gift card to install the spyware build (real example from Facebook). https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/apple-bans-facebook-vpn/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/apple-bans-facebook-vpn/am...
  - JimDabell 3y ago
    > Apple honestly did a pretty good job. They did. Over here, there are regular news articles and warnings from the government as yet more Android users get conned into installing fake banking app APKs that let attackers steal all their money. It’s always the same news article and the same warning – only Android users affected. Elsewhere in this thread, people are saying that you can’t protect people from themselves… but Apple seem to be doing a good job of it. When was the last time a side-loaded IPA stole bank credentials from iPhone users? I personally think that Apple should be a little more open. Having some sort of developer mode with plenty of warnings would be better. But the idea that Apple’s approach doesn’t improve security in meaningful ways to the average user is wishful thinking based more in ideology than what actually happens in the real world.
amalcon 3y ago
"Easily, but there's a big scary warning that the person asking you to do this might be trying to hack you" is still "easily". That obviously seems more consumer friendly than either extreme.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  Those warnings only go so far against a talented social engineer.
  - 3np 3y ago
    At some point, you can not protect people from themselves.
Spivak 3y ago
I don't think you deserve the downvotes, this is exactly right and is incredibly frustrating. Programmers, and increasingly folks who don't consider themselves to be writing malware, have no concept of a thing that should never be done by an application and only by the end user. If it's possible to do I should be allowed to do it! If they didn't want me doing it they should have stopped me! The amount of guides on the internet not targeted toward developers that teach users to go through the "create an application" flow and grant some random app access to their account in a more privileged way than would be allowed by the app itself is embarrassing for our industry. "Just add this configuration profile!", "Just paste in your API key." The moment you allow users to add custom root certs ad blocker apps are going to ask users to add one for "advanced" network level ad blocking. You can't win with this crap. Nobody considers themselves a "not advanced" user so no amount of warning will ever work. Have you ever tried doing something, saw some warning that said this was for advanced users in your way to do the thing, and stopped? Me neither.
loa_in_ 3y ago
> sites have to `log` a big scary "Don't paste anything someone tells you to paste into here" message into the built-in developer tools because no matter how many safety features get added to the browser security model, the dev tools can bypass them. That doesn't seem all that much work. Hardening things like that should be a dedicated job, but of course it doesn't "create value" so it's mostly left to rot until it's a source of bad PR.
inetknght 3y ago
> For a lot of users, "It's really hard to break" is a value-add. "It's really hard to break" should not be conducive to the dumbing down of the populace. Enabling power users is therefore more desirable. And importantly, the two do not have to be mutually exclusive.
- simondotau 3y ago
  I agree with you in theory, but in practice half the population are never going to become security experts and it's impractical to force them to learn through necessity. If a hacker can get root on your smartphone, they can probably get access to your bank account (and the 2FA), your email, your private/intimate photos, your medical issues, your sexual secrets, and so on. A smartphone is far higher stakes than anything else which has come before it. To be clear, I think our right to have a smartphone we control is an absolute. It's extremely important. I would march on the street to protect that right. But I'm equally protective of my right to have a smartphone I cannot control no matter what button I press. I'm glad for devices like the iPhone where the manufacturer works damn hard to make sure that it's always under the manufacturer's control.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

I agree with your first sentence. The second seems to get less and less true all the time.

userbinator 3y ago
The former is a necessary condition of the latter.