this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
483 points (94.5% liked)
Privacy
32028 readers
838 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not a bad feature to ensure that eg if there's a malicious process running on your computer it can't send all your signal data to whomever
Needing to enter a secure passphrase each time you want to use signal in exchange for one more fragile layer of defence for that one part of your data in a scenario that would normally mean you've already lost unless you're running a super-secure compartmentalized operating system like qubes or something is probably not worth it for most people.
I already enter a passphrase every time I want to use Signal; I use the Molly client on my phone. It's really not a big deal. I also enter a passphrase every time I launch my password manager, every time I launch my two-factor authentication app on my phone, and every time I open my email client. I think it's fairly standard to protect sensitive data on your computer with encryption at rest and to decrypt it upon launching the application that handles the data.
Huh. I would've thought most desktop users just leave it running all day long like I do. Obviously there is the disk encryption passphrase at boot, adding another one for signal would in my case be redundant.
But the point is not only how easy it is to enter a passphrase, but also how much security that actually gains you. I don't think it does much on the typical desktop, be it windows or linux, where there are so many ways to escalate or persist privilege for anyone that has user-level access.
They do. OP is not a normal user.
I also have full disk encryption, but I still have some databases on my disk encrypted because I decrypt my disk when I boot my computer. But yeah if you have Signal open (& its db decrypted) all the time it would probably be minimal. I don't have Signal open all the time though, only when I want to check messages or am actively using it
The point would be encryption, even the root user wouldn't be able to read encrypted data if they don't have the passphrase
If you have root, intercepting all the user's keystrokes is trivial.