Admin on the slrpnk.net Lemmy instance.

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  • 42 Posts
  • 115 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 19th, 2022

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  • It is possible that people get access to your server while it is running via known or unkown software vulnerabilities, but that isn’t really the point… all I am saying is that if you host your server at home, it is unlikely that at-rest disk-encryption does you any good and it certainly doesn’t help to protect against illicit remote access.

    What it does “help” is preventing you from remotely accessing your own server if it rebooted for some reason… and many other such footguns that you will experience sooner or later.


  • No the Nextcloud DB is not excrypted, but neither is your LUKS file system while the computer is running. Anyone getting access to the server while it is running, can access all the data unencrypted. For a server this is the much more likely scenario than for a laptop, which might get stolen while turned off.

    At-rest disk encryption is useful for servers in co-location hosting, where a 3rd party might be able to pull a disk from the system, or if you are a large data-center that regularly discards old drives with customer data, and you want to ensure that no 3rd party can access that data from the discarded drives.















  • No, if your system can’t support 3rd party clients properly, it is inherently insecure, especially in an e2ee context where you supposedly don’t have to trust the server/vendor. If a system claims to be e2ee, but tightly controls both clients and servers (for example WhatsApp), that means they can rug-pull that e2ee at any point in time and even selectively target people with custom updates to break that e2ee for them only. The only way to realistically protect yourself from that is using a 3rd party client (and yes, I know, in case of Signal also theoretically reviewing every code change and using reproducible builds, but that’s not very realistic).

    Now admittedly, Signal has started to be less hostile to 3rd party clients like Molly, so it’s not as bad anymore as it used to be.





  • Telegram’s encryption isn’t open source, so no one can verify it’s soundness or risks.

    This is not true, it is available in the open-source Telegram clients.

    What you probably mean is that it is using an unusual and not well studied encryption algorithm. This means you need to be a real cryptography expert to spot flaws in it.

    Telegram justifies this with a bit of FUD about well known encryption algorithm being NSA sponsored etc, but when cryptography experts did look at Telegram’s homegrown algorithm they were less than impressed.