As more people flock over to the fediverse from reddit, twitter and other centralised proprietary networks it is important that you keep your e-mail and other important accounts safe from hijacking attempts. Since anyone can simply spin up an instance and host users and communities it is important that you don’t divulge your internet personal details to anyone as these can be harvested by the instance owner and by any instance you erroneously try to login to or simply the instance could be hacked and the user data harvasted. With this in mind here are some suggestions for good OPSEC (Operation Security):
- Don’t use your main e-mail address. Either create a new one or better sign up for an e-mail forwarding service and set-up forwarding addresses for each instance you sign up to. Since these are throw away addresses, if it gets leaked you can just delete the address and create a new one without compromising your main e-mail address. (Bonus: this can also be used to use unique addresses for traditional web services and make it easy to know how and from where an address got leaked)
Here is a nice article with some e-mail forwarding providers to get you started
- Use a password manager and generate strong and unique passwords for any and all instances and services you use, this way you won’t divulge a password used on another account to the instance owner, or if the address used (especially if you used your main e-mail address)/got leaked your account will still be safe from hijacking by attempting to use password dictionaries to guess the password.
Some passvault suggestions:
- Passbolt (self hosted)
- Bitwarden (self hosted and hosted options)
- Vaultwarden (unlocked self hosted alternative to bitwarden)
These are my main security suggestions for all you new and existing lemmings. Feel free to suggest other security considerations to have and other services beyond those mentioned. Stay safe and have fun posting and commenting.
You could add keepassxc as an option for those who don’t want a hosted service at all. You can still exchange the storage file with other computers if you have to (via USB stick, mail, nextcloud etc)
I second this option. I use it because there’s an app that supports the file format for pretty much every platform.
What do you use in iOS?
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I also use keepassium and sync with Drive
I feel like this option is honestly worse for most people. You have the new security problem of having to transfer the file everywhere, but now the huge inconvenience of potentially losing it or not having it on a new device.
I don’t think transferring the file is a security problem, with hosted services you need to transfer the secrets somehow as well. And cannot choose how they are synced and must rely on the server being secured (in case that component is not hosted by you). Since it is synced to all devices, you are basically having a distributed backup of it already. But I agree, initial setup is a slight bit more work.
And can use syncthing to sync between your devices
Do you know of a “keepass for dummies”? I’ve tried to figure out how to use it, but reading the readme on GitHub just makes me feel like an idiot.
Was there anything particularly confusing? I can try and clear it up.
You can go on the KeePass downloads page and find a client that works for you. I like using Keepassium on my iPhone and KeePassXC on my laptop.
I finally figured it out. I’m using KeepassXD on Android and it’s not very user friendly. I still haven’t figured out what the unlabeled teardrops are that can be “enabled” or disabled.
Maybe try keepass2android instead
Speaking of which, stuff that frequently comes up in privacy related forums:
Differentiate between your professional accounts (it has your real name attached) and your non-professional ones (you use it to discuss pooping methods for example). Don’t mix them up. I know many will say “so what if people in the fediverse know where I live and how I poop, I got nothing to hide” a lot, but that’s how people got doxxed or swatted.
Even if you don’t feel the need to, it’s good to sit down and identify the potential threats given certain problems. Do you recycle passwords for email and social media accounts? What about banking? If a malicious coworker or an immature family member got access to your social media profile and posted reputation-damaging content, how bad can things get? Identify the outcomes you can mitigate or must prevent, and plan accordingly.
There is no “100%” when it comes to privacy. It’s a process, not an “all-or-nothing” switch. Beginners often ask if “program X and Y will protect me 100%”, and the answer usually boils down to “there isn’t a single magic pill”.
Privacy ≠ Security ≠ Anonymity. A VPN subscription can secure your connection (content secret in transit), but does not make you anonymous (sender known to middle node). You could leave an anonymous message (sender unknown) on a public forum, but the message itself isn’t private (content not secret). And so on.
Encryption is a useful tool, but don’t fall for the “military grade encryption” speech. They often mean “we just slapped whatever shit it came up with”, nothing extraordinary.
There are many more but I will stop for now. No, I am not in Guantanamo.
Great points all around!
It’s not very open-sourcey, but Apple include a email forwarding service called Hide My Email in their iCloud+ plans. So, you may already have access to that service.
I totally agree with using strong unique password manager generated passwords for every server (as everyone should do for every service they use regardless) but my email has been leaked so many times by so many breaches I’m not sure I really care about that part at this point…
I use + addresses for stuff.
Well, since I run my own mail server, I tend to use _ instead of + as the separator, simply because more places will consider it a valid address.
But it’s amazing how useful it is to include the name of whoever you’re giving the email address to in the email address. It lets you keep getting email for stuff like password recovery. And when an address is leaked, not only can you block that one, but you also get to know who leaked it.
Which is awesome for knowing which businesses to never use again.
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Good advice for outside the fediverse too
For sure! Just with how the fediverse is composed this I found that this kind of advice now more than ever is incredibly important!
Or get yourself your own domain name, and use a email service provider that can forward all emails of the domain name to one account.
When I made my account was the first time I used a Firefox relay account for more than just testing how it worked 😂 didn’t even think about the fact that fediverse instances are probably “less secure” or could even be outright malicious from the get. Been using bitwarden for about a year now and honestly I love it as well.
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Don’t do this.
Just use a good, random, password generator with decent settings.
Varying away from that just to ‘change the kind of password’ is only going to reduce your security.
You want as many random bits of information as possible in the password. That’s it.
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That’s like saying that only using high security locks with various security pins in them to protect your house is a bad idea, and you should throw in some secured with padlocks too just to change things up.
And if some of them are shitty masterlocks, well, you’re changing things up.
That’s really not how security works.
Yes, pass phrases can have large amounts of entropy attached. But unless you are picking your pass phrases truly randomly, with a large dictionary, and using unique pass phrases per site, and the sites are not silently truncating the password input (such as bcrypt which truncates to 72 bytes), you are not actually getting that large amount of entropy.
Where as a 16 character password that randomly uses the ASCII printable range, excluding spaces, gives you 93^16 possible combinations. That’s 31313180170800116587336013460801 passwords.
Or, very roughly, 104.6 bits of entropy. (104.6265409777285022441578006899739 bits of entropy if you want to be downright absurd about it.)
Knowing that you’re doing that simply doesn’t help the attacker in any meaningful way.
Bumping that to 20 characters gives you over 130 bits of entropy, or 2342388736625917052139104541473924426001 possible combinations.
This is quite simply not a viable attack surface.
Where as saying ‘use pass phrases for some things’ means that it is quite likely that some of your pass phrases are going to be much less secure than this.
But let’s give the same numbers for properly generated random passphrases.
The xkcdpass utility can help us here.
Even picking entirely randomly, out of a large word list of 7227 words, a 6 word pass phrase only gives roughly 76 bits of entropy.
Going up to 8 words gives us roughly 102 bits of entropy, that helps a ton… Except that some of those passphrases are going to be longer than 72 bytes. So you’re almost certainly losing bits of entropy.
That best case still gives you fewer bits of entropy than a 20 character randomly generated password. Unless you’re trying to memorize your password, there are no benefits to alternating between randomly generated passwords with good generation settings and passphrases.
And if you’re trying to memorize your passwords, you are definitely doing it wrong.
Hello there, and welcome to our community! I hope you like it in here.
Could you please include some body text as to why should people know this, and how would that help them? It’s our second rule. Thank you :)
I find that all that is well explained in the intro paragraph.
