Tuesday, January 3. 2006
Make security more easy
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Cryptsetup was the defacto for sometime for using dm-crypt to pipe i/o through a cipher of your choice. Cryptsetup is dead now, LUKS (http://luks.endorphin.org/) has taken it's place. The great thing about LUKS is it also has a gnome GUI which I've seen some Ubuntuer trying to use, so the potential for tossing in your encrypted usb keychain and typing in a password is there. Also LUKS supports all the old cryptsetup functionality in their own cryptsetup-luks command line util (available in portage).
For the admin types cryptsetup-luks is very easy to use for day to day usage, also you can set it up with /etc/conf.d/cryptfs and do things like random encrypted swap/tmp partitions on bootup.
This is a major problem today, our algos are getting weak and no one has brought crypto to the masses. We need a major movement, I say "crypto to the people".
Also we need to start getting off closed solutions like AIM or MSN. Who controls the service and who has access to your data is going to become a bigger issue over the years.
Hope that helps.
For the admin types cryptsetup-luks is very easy to use for day to day usage, also you can set it up with /etc/conf.d/cryptfs and do things like random encrypted swap/tmp partitions on bootup.
This is a major problem today, our algos are getting weak and no one has brought crypto to the masses. We need a major movement, I say "crypto to the people".
Also we need to start getting off closed solutions like AIM or MSN. Who controls the service and who has access to your data is going to become a bigger issue over the years.
Hope that helps.
Thanks, reading this article I also want to hint on LUKS.
encfs works perfectly here. It's fast, it's secure, it does not need fixed size partitions and it just works!
I've been on about making security easy to use for ages. Take something as "simple" as encrypting and signing email in Evolution, it should be default and why is there no easy way when I'm on a mailing list and other people sign their mail to verify the signature against a known database - this should be automatic or at the very least a one click operation.
On the lower level we could look at some of the malloc work OpenBSD did for their 3.8 release, it's well within specification and yet it breaks a lot of applications - security as debugging, this would be a great idea to enable on development branches (I guess for Gentoo ~x86 would be a decent choice). Weed out those easy to spot bugs, and for production releases to counter the overhead it carries we could disable it, once the easy to spot bugs have been removed we still gain a bit of security from this.
I for one would fully support secure by default, we have useflag defaults to help us, security should be something you explicitly turn off, not turn on. Even if the birthing process is a bit painful.
The good news would be that the newer glibc and gcc 4.1 come with some great out of the box features to enhance security and combat those nasty stack smashing attacks. SELinux is shaping up and has great backing. We should in theory be improving.
Tor out of the box would be great, especially if forums.gentoo.org would allow me to post using the default setup. Tor might be slow now, but as there's more widespread adoption we should hopefully see it get faster.
On the lower level we could look at some of the malloc work OpenBSD did for their 3.8 release, it's well within specification and yet it breaks a lot of applications - security as debugging, this would be a great idea to enable on development branches (I guess for Gentoo ~x86 would be a decent choice). Weed out those easy to spot bugs, and for production releases to counter the overhead it carries we could disable it, once the easy to spot bugs have been removed we still gain a bit of security from this.
I for one would fully support secure by default, we have useflag defaults to help us, security should be something you explicitly turn off, not turn on. Even if the birthing process is a bit painful.
The good news would be that the newer glibc and gcc 4.1 come with some great out of the box features to enhance security and combat those nasty stack smashing attacks. SELinux is shaping up and has great backing. We should in theory be improving.
Tor out of the box would be great, especially if forums.gentoo.org would allow me to post using the default setup. Tor might be slow now, but as there's more widespread adoption we should hopefully see it get faster.