This article will describe how lemmy instance admins can purge images from pict-rs (click here if you just want to know how).
This is (also) a horror story about accidentally uploading very sensitive data to Lemmy, and the (surprisingly) difficult task of deleting it.
Intro
tl;dr I (accidentally) uploaded a photo of my State-issued ID to Lemmy, and I couldn’t delete it.
Friends don’t let friends compose jerboa comments in bed before coffee (@theyshane)
A few weeks ago I woke up to my 06:00 AM alarm, snoozed my phone, rubbed my eyes, and started reading /c/worldnews (on Lemmy).
Still half-asleep, I was typing a comment when my thumb accidentally hit the “upload media” button. Up popped a gallery of images. I tried to click the back button, but I missed. I tapped on a photo. The photo that I tapped-on was a KYC selfie image (that I took the previous day for a service that has no business having such PII anyway).
That was all it took — two consecutive mis-taps while half-asleep in bed, and my dumb-ass just inadvertently uploaded a KYC selfie onto the public internet. And thanks to archaic State authentication systems, anyone with . . . → Read More: Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)
This post will help to provide historical context and demystify what’s under the hood of Heads, PureBoot, and other tools to provide Trusted Boot.
I will not be presenting anything new in this article; I merely hope to provide a historical timeline and a curated list of resources.
Intro
The Librem Key cryptographically verifies the system’s integrity and flashes red if it’s detected tampering
I’ve always felt bad about two things:
Because I run QubesOS, I usually disable “Secure Boot” on my laptop I travel a lot, and I don’t have a good way to verify the integrity of my laptop (eg from an Evil Maid that gains physical access to my computer)
To address this, I have turned to Heads and PureBoot — a collection of technologies including an open-source firmware/BIOS, TPM, and a USB security key that can cryptographically verify the integrity of the lowest firmware (and up the chain to the OS).
While Purism has written many articles about PureBoot and has some (minimal) documentation, I found they did a lot of hand waving without explaining how the technology works (what the hell is a “BIOS measurement”?). So I spent a great deal of . . . → Read More: Trusted Boot (Anti-Evil-Maid, Heads, and PureBoot)
In 2021, I raised $18,507 on CrowdSupply to manufacture and sell the BusKill cable. This article will review my experience working with Crowd Supply.
Introduction
So you have a great idea for a cool product, but you’re not sure how to scrap up the necessary funds to ramp-up production and sell it? If you’re a traditional capitalist then you’d be considering financing your new entrepreneurial venture through loans or venture capital.
But you’re not a capitalist. You want to avoid the fat cats draining equity from your hard labor. Your idea is so cool, why not try your hand at crowdfunding direct from your soon-to-be customers?
Why Crowd Supply?
The first place I looked was Kickstarter. But I did some googling, and I saw so many people complain that they backed a project on kickstarter and never received anything from the creator. In fact, Kickstarter’s own Fulfillment Report says that 9% of all their projects fail to deliver.
And, especially in the computer security department, if anyone with half a brain scans through the projects on kickstarter, even the ones that raise $1 million scream SCAM! Either their promises are unrealistic, they clearly have no idea what they’re talking . . . → Read More: Crowdfunding on Crowd Supply (Review of my experience)
This guide will show you how to generate and view XHProf reports of your WordPress Site.
This is useful so you can drill-down and see exactly how many microseconds each of your scripts and functions (themes & plugins) are running when generating a page — slowing down your website visitors’ page load speed.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
This article will describe how you can utilize GitHub Actions to scan user-contributed PRs for unicode and automatically warn you if such commits contain (potentially invisible & malicious) unicode characters.
Why
Last month Trojan Source was published — which described how malicious unicode characters could make source code appear benign, yet compile to something quite malicious.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
This article will describe how to point a .onion domain at your existing wordpress sites (on wordpress multisite) so that your website will be accessible both on the clearnet and directly on the darknet via a .onion domain.
Intro
There are numerous security benefits for why millions of people use tor every day. Besides the obvious privacy benefits for journalists, activists, cancer patients, etc — Tor has a fundamentally different approach to encryption (read: it’s more secure).
Instead of using the untrustworthy X.509 PKI model, all connections to a v3 .onion address is made to a single pinned certificate that is directly correlated to the domain itself (the domain is just a hash of the public key + some metadata).
Moreover, some of the most secure operating systems send all the user’s Internet traffic through the Tor network — for the ultimate data security & privacy of its users.
In short, your users are much safer communicating to your site using a .onion domain than its clearnet domain.
For all these reasons, I wanted to make all my wordpress sites directly available to tor users. Unfortunately, I found that it’s not especially easy to point a .onion domain at . . . → Read More: WordPress Multisite on the Darknet (Mercator .onion alias)
This post will describe how add translations (i18n), pdf/epub builds, and branch-specific versioned documentation to a Read-the-Docs-themed sphinx site hosted with GitHub Pages and built with GitHub’s free CI/CD tools.
This is part two of a two-part series. Before reading this, you should already be familiar with Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (1/2).
ⓘ Note: If you don’t care about how this works and you just want to make a functional repo, you can just fork my ‘rtd-github-pages’ GitHub repo.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
This post will outline recommended steps to harden phpList after install to make it reasonably secure.
phpList is the most popular open-source software for managing mailing lists. Like wordpress, they have a phplist.com for paid hosting services and phplist.org for free self-hosting.
Earlier this week, it was announced that phpList had a critical security vulnerability permitting an attacker to bypass authentication and login as an administrator using an incorrect & carefully-crafted password in some cases. This bug is a result of the fact that [a] PHP is a loosely typed language and [b] the phpList team was using the ‘==‘ operator to test for equality of the user’s hashed password against the DB. This security pitfall has been known in PHP since at least 2010 (a decade ago!), but I’m sure the same mistake will be made again..
Indeed, security is porous. There’s no such thing as 100% vulnerability-free code, and phpList is no exception. But if we’re careful in adding layers of security to our infrastructure, then we might be able to protect ourselves from certain 0-days.
That said, here’s my recommended steps to making your phpList install reasonably secure.
This post will introduce a simple udev rule and ~$20 in USB hardware that effectively implements a kill cord Dead Man Switch to trigger your machine to self-destruct in the event that you’re kicked out of the helm position.
Rubber Ducky I <3 you; you make hack time lots of fun!
Let’s consider a scenario: You’re at a public location (let’s say a cafe) while necessarily authenticated into some super important service (let’s say online banking). But what if–after you’ve carefully authenticated–someone snatch-and-runs with your laptop?
Maybe you can call your bank to freeze your accounts before they’ve done significant financial harm. Maybe you can’t.
Or maybe your laptop was connected to your work VPN. In less than 60 seconds and with the help of a rubber ducky, the thief could literally cause millions of dollars in damages to your organization.
Surely there must be some solution to trigger your computer to lock, shutdown, or self-destruct when it’s physically separated from you! There is: I call it BusKill.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
