Gleason walked into the SocialHub to drop his latest innovation and I’m sitting here trying to work out whether he just proudly announced that he introduced a security bug into his own software or not
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Erin 💽✨ (erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 09:19:33 JST Erin 💽✨ -
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Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 09:19:30 JST Evan Prodromou @erincandescent highjacking your thread to ask: what do you think about using mutual TLS instead of HTTP Signature? It authenticates the server only, but it saves time and effort.
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Erin 💽✨ (erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 09:19:32 JST Erin 💽✨ Specifically the key ID isn’t signed so if you’re sharing private keys, someone who captures a signed message can just swap key IDs
Capturing a signed message sounds hard but if you do manage to do it you can probably e.g. read private posts accessible to anyone on your instance
So its probably not an issue for mostr because that’s a bridge to libertarian hellscape where everything is public all the time but in general I dunno the security calculus is nontrivial
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Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 14:02:14 JST Evan Prodromou @erincandescent @trwnh I think the trick with terminators is they can add the CN as a custom HTTP header. There are a half-dozen Medium posts on how to do this on Google. I might need to do a POC for this.
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Erin 💽✨ (erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 14:02:15 JST Erin 💽✨ @trwnh @evan anyway I like mutual TLS in theory but in practice there’s the problem that most instances are running behind TLS terminators so they don’t necessarily have access to their own TLS keys
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Erin 💽✨ (erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 14:02:17 JST Erin 💽✨ @trwnh @evan i believe they also authenticate the user because otherwise how do you know who should have access to a post?
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infinite love ⴳ (trwnh@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 14:02:18 JST infinite love ⴳ @evan @erincandescent aren't most softwares rn only authenticating the server already anyway? it's a core assumption of the "instance" model
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Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 14:06:46 JST Evan Prodromou @erincandescent @trwnh the way to win every AP argument is to bring up BCC and BTO
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Erin 💽✨ (erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 14:06:47 JST Erin 💽✨ @trwnh @evan (In the fully general case ActivityPub’s bcc/bto fields mean that you can’t assume you know the full audience of a post from the post object)
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Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 14:07:44 JST Evan Prodromou @trwnh @erincandescent yes.
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bumblefudge (by_caballero@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 14:09:38 JST bumblefudge @trwnh @evan @erincandescent i know i'm a broken record and everyone thinks it's because i have a dayjob in the "at your own risk" factory but self-managed keys would definitely make feature-parity (and interoperability) with nostr and bluesky a lot easier, which seem more popular goals than "authenticate me with my crypto wallet/Hooli wallet/microsoft authenticator" per se
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Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 14:09:38 JST Evan Prodromou @by_caballero @trwnh @erincandescent *eyeroll* the reason we're winning is because of our basis in the web, domains, and URLs, not despite it.
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bumblefudge (by_caballero@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 14:09:39 JST bumblefudge @trwnh @evan @erincandescent do we want to pour even more cement around the instance model? if we at least enable per-user keys (even if only potentially/annoying/complexly) some instances have the option of decentralizing themselves, or at least giving individual users the choice to self-manage at their own risk...
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Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 14:11:17 JST Evan Prodromou @erincandescent another benefit is that it's not dependent on an idea that Cavage wrote out on a McDonald's napkin in 2015 or whatever
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Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 14:19:57 JST Evan Prodromou @erincandescent @trwnh regardless, I think we're stuck with draft-cavage for the near term but I think we can get along fine without the HTTP signature layer entirely if we just use the certs we already had to get from letsencrypt
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Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2024 14:28:36 JST Evan Prodromou @erincandescent @trwnh it was the right decision btw
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