cyphar
Joined 12 years ago
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Recent submissions
Comment · 20 hours ago
I am aware of sealed sender, I even mentioned it in my comment. ;)
My point is that by construction they are not an anonymity tool, no centralised server can be. They can add features to make it less easy to track users but that's not the same as providing anonymity, and it's important to not confuse the two.
To give an example: my email provider has a feature to auto-encrypt all inbound emails to a PGP public key. Is this a nice feature to make it harder for someone to read my past emails if someone gets access to their infrastructure? Sure. Does this make my emails end-to-end encrypted? Absolutely not. In a similar vein, Signal making social graph correlation harder is a welcome feature but is not the same as making it anonymous.
Comment · 1 day ago
This argument doesn't make sense, Signal is fundamentally not an anonymity tool. It's a privacy tool.
They intentionally store very little data about their users but their "mailbox" model explicitly means that the server (or an attacker) can figure out who is talking to whom. And that's fine! Signal isn't trying to be an anonymity network, so while stuff like sealed sender are nice features it's important to remember that anonymity breaks are explicitly not part of the Signal threat model.
"Don't stand out" only makes sense as advice for anonymity tools to avoid bifurcating the anonymity set -- it doesn't make much sense when you're taking about a service which links your account to your phone number and thus every server request is explicitly identifying you.
Comment · 1 day ago
The Bitcoin genesis block literally contains the message:
> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
I would've thought the implication was kind of obvious? And I'm not sure why you mention Dodd-Frank -- there were many bailouts throughout 2007-2010 and the point of Dodd-Frank was to put an end to that scheme.
Comment · 7 days ago
This has been the case for more than a decade, Heartbleed was probably the one which really created the trend.
Comment · 9 days ago
Is it not obvious that not every global .com website owner wants to use only have the choice of US-run CAs (which can be subject to National Security Letters)? If you permit some other countries to certify .com then you're back to the same political question of which countries are allowed to run CAs.
It's also not at all a given that website owners would prefer the national CAs -- as an obvious example, most Rust projects (foo.rs) would probably not trust the Serbian CAs as much as they would LetsEncrypt. Even for website owners that live in the country, it seems possible that Chinese website owners might prefer to use non-Chinese CAs. And again, if the solution is to just special-case one American legal entity then we have just moved back to the original VeriSign-signs-everything model.
The real issue is that the CA model has been obviously broken since at least the days of the Comodo hack -- the trust decision for who can certify the website identity is made by the website owner but really clients are the ones that actually care (it's their data at the end of the day) and they have no input. Moxie had a proposal in 2011 to fix this by letting clients decide the policies for how a certificate should be trusted[1] and I think it is a far more workable solution than the alternatives. If one of the LetsEncrypt intermediates was compromised none of the alternative proposals would have any real hope of providing a workable mitigation.
Comment · 10 days ago
I think Moxie's "convergence" proposal from ~2011[1] has the most benefits with the least downsides -- in particular I think he really pointed out the crux of the issue: the fact that servers decide who is trustworthy enough to certify their certificates and clients have no input into that decision is a broken model.
This incident was obviously comically bad but the Comodo hack had a more painful impact on the mitigation that should give everyone pause -- their CA had signed a quarter of the internet's certificates so the trust couldn't just be revoked. Imagine one of the LetsEncrypt intermediates got compromised -- our mitigation strategies really cannot cope with that kind of disaster scenario. Browsers would be in the unenviable position where they'd be forced to make huge portions of the internet go dark for potentially months.
Comment · 10 days ago
I wonder if more CPU cycles would be spent in the transporting and other ancillary operations (hashing and signing) than would be spent if they "brute-forced" it. Crazy.
Comment · 11 days ago
This issue with the "official" Docker images is the reason why (when I was still at SUSE) we switched to pushing releases ourselves to our own project and then eventually to our own registry.
This push for centralisation without the infrastructure to back it up has always been the most frustrating aspect of Docker Inc over the past >10 years I've worked on container runtimes.
Comment · 14 days ago
There is a 2003 interview with Shigeru Miyamoto that suggests an "enormous" timeline document existed since at least 2002 and they took it into account when writing Wind Waker if not earlier games[1]:
> Shigeru Miyamoto: For every Zelda game we tell a new story, but we actually have an enormous document that explains how the game relates to the others, and bind them together. But to be honest, they are not that important to us. We care more about developing the game system… give the player new challenges for every chapter that is born.
So I don't think this is as clear cut as "a different group of people decades later make a timeline". The least charitable view might be that they never intended the unified timeline thing to became public and didn't consider it "lore", but I'm not sure I buy that either (since they talked about some details in other interviews, including the Victorious/Fallen Hero split most people object to).
[1]: https://www.nintendoforums.com/articles/40/super-play-magazi...
Comment · 14 days ago
The timeline was obviously not a planned aspect of the story originally and I personally don't find it particularly great storytelling but there is evidence in interviews of a timeline document existing internally since at least 2002[1] (where Shigeru Miyamoto explicitly said they do take it into consideration when writing the game's story but primarily focus on the games individually).
Maybe they did release the timeline because of fan pressure but some sort of timeline did exist for at least a decade before they released it which doesn't fit your theory they just came up with something and released it in secondary media because of fan pressure.
[1]: https://www.nintendoforums.com/articles/40/super-play-magazi...
Comment · 14 days ago
While I agree in spirit and think that was true for most of the games when written, there has been an official timeline published by Nintendo[1,2] since 2011 (and the idea was apparently around internally since 2002).
I would be surprised if it did not have some impact on the writing of the games, though of course there is (as of yet) no explicit reference to the timeline in the games.
[1]: https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_timeline [2]: https://zelda.nintendo.com/about/
Comment · 15 days ago
> The Bene Gesserit woman knew it was healthy because of her abilities, and upon investigation it was found that the hospital’s AI had been running a eugenics program.
The irony. Perhaps the Bene Gesserit were just trying to "pace the frontier" of the eugenics market? Who can say?
Comment · 15 days ago
By "batching" I was referring to whether they deduplicate requests -- if they do one HTTP request for every password then you get some extra information about how passwords are shared that you would have to infer otherwise.
If you know someone with N logins has N passwords it's a decent indication they use a password manager and so passwords are unlikely to be weak, if they have 1 password it's probably shared elsewhere and weak.
I also wasn't responding to a question asking about practical exploits, I was responding to a question that claimed the k-anonymity model is "provably anonymous" and "harmless". Since it clearly leaks some information it's definitely not the former and one could argue it's not the later though the "harm" is minimal.
> My browser fingerprint leaks, what, thousands of times more information than that - surely fixing applications like Chrome ...
I fail to see how the privacy nightmare of modern browsers is relevant to a discussion on whether opt-out signalling to third-party services is a reasonable stance for an open source project? By that metric no privacy bug is worth reporting because Chrome continues to exist. If only there was a term for this kind of non-sequitur...
github.com/cyphar ; www.cyphar.com