9 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2021
  2. Nov 2020
    1. Now let me get back to your question. The FBI presents its conflict with Apple over locked phones as a case as of privacy versus security. Yes, smartphones carry a lot of personal data—photos, texts, email, and the like. But they also carry business and account information; keeping that secure is really important. The problem is that if you make it easier for law enforcement to access a locked device, you also make it easier for a bad actor—a criminal, a hacker, a determined nation-state—to do so as well. And that's why this is a security vs. security issue.

      The debate should not be framed as privacy-vs-security because when you make it easier for law enforcement to access a locked device, you also make it easier for bad actors to do so as well. Thus it is a security-vs-security issue.

  3. Jun 2020
    1. EFF describes this as “a major threat,” warning that “the privacy and security of all users will suffer if U.S. law enforcement achieves its dream of breaking encryption.”
    2. Once the platforms introduce backdoors, those arguing against such a move say, bad guys will inevitably steal the keys. Lawmakers have been clever. No mention of backdoors at all in the proposed legislation or the need to break encryption. If you transmit illegal or dangerous content, they argue, you will be held responsible. You decide how to do that. Clearly there are no options to some form of backdoor.
    3. While this debate has been raging for a year, the current “EARN-IT’ bill working its way through the U.S. legislative process is the biggest test yet for the survival of end-to-end encryption in its current form. In short, this would enforce best practices on the industry to “prevent, reduce and respond to” illicit material. There is no way they can do that without breaking their own encryption. QED.
    4. Governments led by the U.S., U.K. and Australia are battling the industry to open up “warrant-proof” encryption to law enforcement agencies. The industry argues this will weaken security for all users around the world. The debate has polarized opinion and is intensifying.
    1. Such is the security of this architecture, that it has prompted law enforcement agencies around the world to complain that they now cannot access a user’s messages, even with a warrant. There is no backdoor—the only option is to compromise one of the endpoints and access messages in their decrypted state.
  4. May 2020
  5. Dec 2019
    1. Now using sudo to work around the root account is not only pointless, it's also dangerous: at first glance rsyncuser looks like an ordinary unprivileged account. But as I've already explained, it would be very easy for an attacker to gain full root access if he had already gained rsyncuser access. So essentially, you now have an additional root account that doesn't look like a root account at all, which is not a good thing.