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Matthew Garrett
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Hello! I am not posting here any more. You can find me here instead. Most Planets should be updated already (I've an MR open for Planet Gnome), but if you're subscribed to my feed directly please update it. comments
How did IRC ping timeouts end up in a lawsuit?
I recently won a lawsuit against Roy and Rianne Schestowitz, the authors and publishers of the Techrights and Tuxmachines websites. The short version of events is that they were subject to an online harassment campaign, which they incorrectly blamed me for. They responded wit...
Where are we on X Chat security?
AWS had an outage today and Signal was unavailable for some users for a while. This has confused some people, including Elon Musk, who are concerned that having a dependency on AWS means that Signal could somehow be compromised by anyone with sufficient influence over AWS (it...
Investigating a forged PDF
I had to rent a house for a couple of months recently, which is long enough in California that it pushes you into proper tenant protection law. As landlords tend to do, they failed to return my security deposit within the 21 days required by law, having already failed to prov...
Cordoomceps - replacing an Amiga's brain with Doom
There's a lovely device called a pistorm, an adapter board that glues a Raspberry Pi GPIO bus to a Motorola 68000 bus. The intended use case is that you plug it into a 68000 device and then run an emulator that reads instructions from hardware (ROM or RAM) and emulates them. ...
Secure boot certificate rollover is real but probably won't hurt you
LWN wrote an article which opens with the assertion "Linux users who have Secure Boot enabled on their systems knowingly or unknowingly rely on a key from Microsoft that is set to expire in September". This is, depending on interpretation, either misleading or just plain wron...
Why is there no consistent single signon API flow?
Single signon is a pretty vital part of modern enterprise security. You have users who need access to a bewildering array of services, and you want to be able to avoid the fallout of one of those services being compromised and your users having to change their passwords every...
My a11y journey
23 years ago I was in a bad place. I'd quit my first attempt at a PhD for various reasons that were, with hindsight, bad, and I was suddenly entirely aimless. I lucked into picking up a sysadmin role back at TCM where I'd spent a summer a year before, but that's not really wh...
Locally hosting an internet-connected server
I'm lucky enough to have a weird niche ISP available to me, so I'm paying $35 a month for around 600MBit symmetric data. Unfortunately they don't offer static IP addresses to residential customers, and nor do they allow multiple IP addresses per connection, and I'm the sort o...
How Twitter could (somewhat) fix their encrypted DMs
As I wrote in my last post, Twitter's new encrypted DM infrastructure is pretty awful. But the amount of work required to make it somewhat better isn't large.When Juicebox is used with HSMs, it supports encrypting the communication between the client and the backend. This is ...
Twitter's new encrypted DMs aren't better than the old ones
(Edit: Twitter could improve this significantly with very few changes - I wrote about that here. It's unclear why they'd launch without doing that, since it entirely defeats the point of using HSMs)When Twitter[1] launched encrypted DMs a couple of years ago, it was the worst...
Failing upwards: the Twitter encrypted DM failure
Almost two years ago, Twitter launched encrypted direct messages. I wrote about their technical implementation at the time, and to the best of my knowledge nothing has changed. The short story is that the actual encryption primitives used are entirely normal and fine - messag...
The GPU, not the TPM, is the root of hardware DRM
As part of their "Defective by Design" anti-DRM campaign, the FSF recently made the following claim:Today, most of the major streaming media platforms utilize the TPM to decrypt media streams, forcefully placing the decryption out of the user's control (from here).This is par...
When should we require that firmware be free?
The distinction between hardware and software has historically been relatively easy to understand - hardware is the physical object that software runs on. This is made more complicated by the existence of programmable logic like FPGAs, but by and large things tend to fall int...
Android privacy improvements break key attestation
Sometimes you want to restrict access to something to a specific set of devices - for instance, you might want your corporate VPN to only be reachable from devices owned by your company. You can't really trust a device that self attests to its identity, for instance by repor...
What the fuck is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care
Short version: Secure Boot Advanced Targeting and if that's enough for you you can skip the rest you're welcome.Long version: When UEFI Secure Boot was specified, everyone involved was, well, a touch naive. The basic security model of Secure Boot is that all the code that end...
Client-side filtering of private data is a bad idea
(The issues described in this post have been fixed, I have not exhaustively researched whether any other issues exist)Feeld is a dating app aimed largely at alternative relationship communities (think "classier Fetlife" for the most part), so unsurprisingly it's fairly popula...
SSH agent extensions as an arbitrary RPC mechanism
A while back, I wrote about using the SSH agent protocol to satisfy WebAuthn requests. The main problem with this approach is that it required starting the SSH agent with a special argument and also involved being a little too friendly with the implementation - things worked ...
Digital forgeries are hard
Closing arguments in the trial between various people and Craig Wright over whether he's Satoshi Nakamoto are wrapping up today, amongst a bewildering array of presented evidence. But one utterly astonishing aspect of this lawsuit is that expert witnesses for both sides agree...
Debugging an odd inability to stream video
We have a cabin out in the forest, and when I say "out in the forest" I mean "in a national forest subject to regulation by the US Forest Service" which means there's an extremely thick book describing the things we're allowed to do and (somewhat longer) not allowed to do. It...
Dealing with weird ELF libraries
Libraries are collections of code that are intended to be usable by multiple consumers (if you're interested in the etymology, watch this video). In the old days we had what we now refer to as "static" libraries, collections of code that existed on disk but which would be cop...
Making SSH host certificates more usable
Earlier this year, after Github accidentally committed their private RSA SSH host key to a public repository, I wrote about how better support for SSH host certificates would allow this sort of situation to be handled in a user-transparent way without any negative impact on s...
Why does Gnome fingerprint unlock not unlock the keyring?
There's a decent number of laptops with fingerprint readers that are supported by Linux, and Gnome has some nice integration to make use of that for authentication purposes. But if you log in with a fingerprint, the moment you start any app that wants to access stored passwor...
Why ACPI?
"Why does ACPI exist" - - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate, wait no let me start again.Why does ACPI exist? In the beforetimes power management on x86 was done by jumping to an opaque BIOS entry point and ...