Signal should change this, but it's typical of the traditional desktop OS security model in which applications running under the user's account are considered trustworthy. Security-oriented software like Signal should take a more hardened approach, but this is not some glaring security hole.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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That’s what I was thinking, my private keys are also chilling in plaintext on my filesystem.
With even email clients and web browsers running arbitrary and untrusted remote code on a regular basis, that model needs serious reconsideration.
This xkcd shouldn’t still be insightful. https://xkcd.com/1200/
Maybe its time to rethink desktop security. I realize that there is credential manager on windows, keychain on mac, and similar on gnu/linux; even with that it seems for a lot of services "all" you need to do is steal a cookie and all of a sudden you are someone else.
Idea of using a web browser for a platform was dumb enough and the reason why none of the keys were stored in appropriate services.
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I mean if somebody has physical access and is logged in they have your data anyways right?
For Linux not much of a problem since amount of malware is not that big. On Windows however a different story.
End-to-end encryption stops being secure... at the end... Who would've thought
What a useless app decrypts messages on my own screen when I log in with my passwords & other protections/protocols just for me to read them?
No, ty, I'll decrypt everything in my mind only, securely under a tinfoil protection device.
Under normal circumstances I wouldn't expect any privacy between processes on a desktop OS under the same UID.
If you use Chrome's password manager on Windows your password database is unlocked with your password upon login and is available to every process you run.
There's only so much you can do, as an app, to protect against OS deficiencies.
The desktop app on Windows is a sacrifice of security for convenience.
Storing stuff as plain text is so hot right now.
The image is of the iOS app, but the headline is about the desktop app 🧐
unplayable
There's a desktop application?
Yes, and it's quite good. Apart from this.
It's a shitty overbloated Electron app.
It's fast and has good functionality, what exactly is bloated about it?
People being triggered by the sheer existence of Electron – it just HAS to be "shitty", even if it works perfectly fine.
I can appreciate the functionality, but cannot really call an application "good" if it eats up more than half a gigabyte of RAM while being something as simple as a messenger.
Also there are better solutions if you want to have your UI in HTML nowadays. You don’t need to embed a whole web browser in each app.
It takes up half a GB of RAM and constantly keeps the CPU active. It's still on X11 and thus integrates poorly with the rest of my Wayland apps. It seems to report itself to Pipewire as something else every other week and is thus impossible to control reliably.
It works well and I haven't encountered any crashes or other bugs in months. But I genuinely think it could have been much better as a QT app or so. Plus, thanks to Electron there isn't an ARM version either making it impossible to run on my Raspberry Pi or my Pinephone.
Use these to enable Wayland support: --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland
To launch the app on ARM, install electron from package manager, copy paste signal's application directory and launch like this:
/path/to/electron /path/to/app.asar
I don't use Signal, these are generic instructions for electron apps so YMMV.
I don't know why they didn't just make it a web application. It's the same damn thing. Just like there's web.whatsapp.com, make Signal the same way. At least that way I get to use my own browser and in a single instance.
I have a couple problems with it aside from being electron.
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On linux, whether it is a native package or flatpak. I have to launch it twice for it to open.
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I can't restore chats from my phone to the desktop application which frankly sucks. It makes sense if they don't wanna have to store extra data on their servers, but at least let the backups that I manually take on my phone be usable on the desktop. Not having the majority of your conversations from before you linked the desktop app is a pain in the arse.
I never have to launch twice on flatpak.
And I only keep conversations for 2 to 4 weeks so starting over doesn't bother me. Sorry if that doesn't work for you too.
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It doesn’t have gif searching though which is so annoying.
It had a PR open before with gif search, but the desktop dev closed it because he didn’t want to review something so big. Nevermind most of the PR was just assets.
Quite-good is stretching it a bit. It's serviceable but it's still Electron with gazillion megabytes of RAM taken for no reason and absolute nightmare on laptops since browsers like waking CPU a lot.
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I don't see what the big deal is. I store all kinds of sensitive information in plain text. SSNs, credit card numbers, birthdates and religious and political affiliation information.
The guy I bought it all from said it was okay, he stores it in plain text, too. (I'm joking, of course! Any information about you all that I've bought on the dark web, I'm storing responsibly.)
phew!
I don't care what you do with your data... As long as your being careful with my data.
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I trust my computer and operating system. And there are several other keys and credentials stored on that laptop. I think it's better for me to have a file that I can backup and understand how the encryption works, than to do some trickery to hide it mostly from me and maybe a bit from malware, or tie it to some hardware TPM device or something. I'm always not sure if I should rely on those too much.
Am I missing something? Hasn't this been known for years now? I think they previously commented on this before.
It has been known and they can't really change it. I think it's only now that people are realizing this is an issue or at least something happened to start the avalanche.
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At least convert it to wingdings or something.
Wingdings is a font so… it already is.
But surely if it was stored encrypted, it would still need a key to unlock that info. Which would be on your PC. And could therefore be used by anything else to unlock your data.
The only safe way would be encrypt it with a password that only you know, and you'd need to enter before getting back into the software. And there couldn't be any "I forgot my password" function either. You lose it, the data is gone.
Why not password protect the keys (ala Linux ssh / gpg symmetric encryption for local storage of PPK)
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