Free and Open Source Software

18019 readers

7 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

108

Signal under fire for storing encryption keys in plaintext (stackdiary.com)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

46 comments fedilink hide all child comments

As mentioned in the comments, plain text keys aren't bad because they are necessary. You have to have at least one plain text key in order to be able to use encryption

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If I'm not mistaken you can save keys in these chips so that they can not be extracted. You can only use the key to encrypt/decrypt/sign/verify by asking the chip to do these operations with your key.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

That sounds only marginally better. Access to the phone still means you can create a backup containing the key, so TPM wouldn't help much.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No, why would a backup contain non-exportable information? One of the reasons to use TPM to begin with is that sensitive information can't leave it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

How do you restore a backup on another phone without the keys?

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

You would probably use a recovery key that exists exclusively elsewhere like on paper in a vault. Like bitlocker.

I have no idea if signal uses TPM or not but generally keys in TPM are non-exportable which is a very good thing and IMO the primary reason to use TPM at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

One would hope the backup is encrypted.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It is. A password is generated that you have to write down. It must've been a compromise because they knew most people would just pick a shitty password if they didn't generate one and it would end up on a piece of paper or in some digital form anyway.

Anti Commercial-AI license