• 0 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 14th, 2023

help-circle


  • The key difference is that during normal use, the private key of the passkey doesn’t leave the device (or password manager). The passkey basically comes in 2 parts, the public and private (secret) part. In order to log in, the website presents a cryptographic challenge that is only solvable using your private key - and crucially you can solve the challenge without revealing your private key. An attacker could get your answer to the challenge and still be unable to solve additional challenges without the private part of your passkey.

    This of course makes it basically impossible to manually log in using a passkey and a keyboard, without any password manager to do the cryptographic calculations (unless you have a LOT of paper and time), but the security advantage of making it near impossible to be phished is generally regarded as a net positive. In order to steal a passkey there would need to be a vulnerability in the software, since passkeys make it much harder to trick a user into giving it away (since tricking the user into logging in on a fake website doesn’t work due to the aforementioned cryptography, the main way to steal a passkey would be to trick the user into exporting it - which is a much higher bar).


  • If you mean the “passkeys” that are becoming popular as a “password replacement”, it’s basically speaking a public private keypair. What makes it more secure is that, under normal conditions (aside from backing up the passkey), the private “secret” part of the keypair never leaves the app or device it’s stored on. It’s only used temporarily to sign messages and prove that you have the secret key, unlike a password which needs to be sent securely to a server to validate.

    You could in theory store a backup on a USB drive but since passkeys are new, it highly depends on the password manager you use to store the passkey. Since passkeys are more complex than something you can memorize/type, it has to be stored in a password manager of some sort to be useful, so you would need to check that password manager allows backing up passkeys. There is currently work being done to standardize the formats/protocols to transfer passkeys so it seems this is very much up in the air. For example, I use BitWarden which stores passkeys, but it seems like I can only add or delete passkeys to an entry, not export them and apparently they get exported with the passwords when the vault is exported. BitWarden also syncs your vault to every logged in device though so you could see that as a form of backup. Going one step further, even though BitWarden doesn’t have a passkey export/backup feature yet (in addition to Bitwarden’s vault export), the self-hosted server also stores all your passwords including passkeys in regular files which also can be backed up (this is how I back up my VaultWarden instance) - although it would probably be hard to use that backup in any other way besides restoring it onto a BitWarden server instance.

    Edit: I didn’t realize passkeys were exported with the vault export, since I haven’t used it and noticed that editing an entry doesn’t allow you to view passkey data - only remove, updated my comment to reflect that.



  • First I’ll say, if you aren’t able to boot a windows installer off of a flash drive (and nothing’s wrong with your flash drive and you created it without errors and there isn’t a setting in bios preventing you from booting it like disabled USB boot) then it could be a hardware issue that Linux won’t fix (it’s not clear how you tried to reinstall windows). But if you’re able to get to the windows logo or the menu for safe mode then it sounds like it “POSTs” (gets past showing the bios screen) and windows should be reinstallable. In short, I think it’s unlikely to be a problem that only Linux can fix if you want to stick with windows.

    That said, if you are otherwise interested in trying Linux and create a USB installer, most will allow you to exit the installer or choose to go into a temporary “live desktop” where nothing is saved, so it’s a good opportunity to try out how that distro feels to use - just don’t save anything important. And if you do end up installing either OS, you can use that “live mode” to use programs to back up any files from your main hard drive to another plugged in drive.







  • I just discovered how easy ollama and open webui are to set up so I’ve been using llama3 locally too, it was like 20 lines in docker compose, and although I’ve been using gpt3.5 on and off for a long time I’m much more comfortable using models run locally so I’ve been playing with it a lot more. It’s also cool being able to easily switch models at any point during a conversation. I have like 15 models downloaded, mostly 7b and a few 13b models and they all run fast enough on CPU and generate slightly slower than reading speed and only take ~15-30 seconds to start spitting out a response.

    Next I want to set up a vscode plugin so I can use my own locally run codegen models from within vscode.





  • I only do web development, but my networking knowledge mostly comes from being the designated person to call the ISP for tech support and being in charge of setting up the WiFi in every place that I’ve lived, in addition to participating and running community scale mesh wifi tech meetups for many years (think NYCMesh except just 4 guys who never accomplished much aside from buying and flashing lots of routers with openwrt lmao)

    I also ran 12Us of homelab for a few years in my basement, which was powered by an overkill fiber to the home setup (courtesy of tricking Comcast into undercharging me for gigabit pro) that necessitated a 10G switch and firewall.


  • Your ISP knows the Mac address of your router since it requests a public IP from them using DHCP. That’s why if you contact support they usually can confirm the brand of your router by doing an oui lookup.

    In theory the FBI could have collected a list of MACs and optionally used an ASN lookup on the public IP and then handed each ISP their list of MACs, which the ISP could associate back to customers to contact. It would only not work for customers who spoof their router WANs ethernet mac.

    But I think just patching it is a normal and fine solution imo.



  • I’m not a cook but just a general fan of commercial / industrial products (always getting jealous of the stuff I see in my engineer friends machine shops at work, materials science labs, etc), and one of my favorite sites to get ideas for when it comes to household / kitchen stuff is the webstaurant store. I don’t necessarily even buy much stuff because some of the items can only be bought by the case, but it’s fun to browse and if I see something I like I can check if it’s available anywhere else. I have bought a commercial style tall recycling bin and some generic 5 gallon bag in box soda syrups since you could just buy 1 of those, which save a lot of money if you carbonate at home compared to buying soda at the grocery store.

    Anyway they have a surface sanitizer section so you might get some ideas on what to get by browsing there. Again some are by the case but at least a few you can buy a single spray bottle or a single gallon: https://www.webstaurantstore.com/35535/surface-sanitizing-and-disinfecting-chemicals.html

    And of course be sure to read all the directions and warnings since they might be used differently than you would at home, or have different requirements.