Unskilled5117

Tldr: This is a traffic analysis attack, it exposes metadata without help or access to data from whatsapp. Other messengers are vulnerable too. It requires vast resources and access only governments have. It is not a threat model that todays messengers defend against.

The interesting part of the article ist the last one.

According to the internal assessment, the stakes are high: “Inspection and analysis of network traffic is completely invisible to us, yet it reveals the connections between our users: who is in a group together, who is messaging who, and (hardest to hide) who is calling who.”

The analysis notes that a government can easily tell when a person is using WhatsApp, in part because the data must pass through Meta’s readily identifiable corporate servers. A government agency can then unmask specific WhatsApp users by tracing their IP address, a unique number assigned to every connected device, to their internet or cellular service provider account.

WhatsApp’s internal security team has identified several examples of how clever observation of encrypted data can thwart the app’s privacy protections, a technique known as a correlation attack, according to this assessment. In one, a WhatsApp user sends a message to a group, resulting in a burst of data of the exact same size being transmitted to the device of everyone in that group. Another correlation attack involves measuring the time delay between when WhatsApp messages are sent and received between two parties — enough data, the company believes, “to infer the distance to and possibly the location of each recipient.”

Today’s messenger services weren’t designed to hide this metadata from an adversary who can see all sides of the connection,” Green, the cryptography professor, told The Intercept.

At first i thought some reasons sounded reasonable too, but after reading the github issue i changed my mind. See my edit for reasons.

The response by the debian maintainer responsible for this change to the keepassxc developer is an actual disgrace

Request to revert change:

@julian-klode this needs to be reverted asap. This is now our fourth bug report because of the decision to neuter the base KeePassXC package in Debian. Put the base package back where it was and create a keepassxc-minimal.

Response by debian maintainer:

julian-klode commented 9 hours ago: I'm afraid that's not going to happen. It was a mistake to ship with all plugins built by default. This will be painful for a year as users annoyingly do not read the NEWS files they should be reading but there's little that can be done about that. It is our responsibility to our users to provide them the most secure option possible as the default. All of these features are superfluous and do not really belong in a local password database manager, these developments are all utterly misguided. Users who need this crap can install the crappy version but obviously this increases the risk of drive-by contributor attacks.

The whole github issue is worth a read, as it actually explains the issue with the change.

Edit: as i gave the debian maintainers view visibility i wanted to give a quick summary of the keepassxc point of view as well:

• julian-klode specifically mentions attacks by contributors of keepassxc. If you don’t trust the developers, why would you trust the minimal package which is developed by the same people?

• If the Debian packagers have good reason to believe the keepassxc-full version presents a broader attack surface, then they ought to present what they've seen that makes them feel that way, not promote baseless innuendo.

• the features are disabled by default. If you do not opt in, the code never gets executed.

• the safest version of keepassxc is the one thats tested, meaning full featured

• removing all those features doesn’t make it more secure, it dumbs it down to an encrypted spreadsheet and makes it less secure. Users should be automatically notified when one of their accounts has been breached and their password for that account has been found floating in a db dump. Users should rely on their password manager to handle logins for them, so they're less likely to get tricked into a phishing page.

• if you disagree with features in someones app you fork it. You do not change it and distribute it under the same name. A -minimal version would have been ok

• Debians own policy is to communicate with upstream beforehand before introducing changes. This was not the case, nor was there a chance to collaborate on an effective solution for both parties.

• Debian could have chosen to give users an informed choice between -full and -minimal. Instead they broke existing users installs.

• People saying it was released in Debian sid, which is meant for changes. It is also meant for Feedback, which julian-klode refuses to listen to.

That really shouldn’t be happening, make sure to file a bug report if it’s the core themes!

Hasn’t happened to me in the years i have used KDE.

Thats great to hear! Boredsquirrel is right, the download size might not matter to me, but it’s important to improve for a lot of reasons, i can see that.

Edit: For other people reading this, this is a nice read related to the download sizes and what can be done.

On a side note: keep doing what you are doing. Your blog posts and the enthusiasm you displayed in your YouTube videos are what got me interested in universal blue in the first place.

Well there’s a simple thing you are overlooking. You could just not theme Kde with third party themes and extentions and stuff like kvantum themes. It wouldn’t break, just like gnome. Still if you do decide to change stuff its going to be fine most of the time. The beauty of Kde is that there is the option to change stuff, but you aren’t required to.

KDEs default layout is really beautiful and well put together, just like gnome is.

Oh and don’t forget to take backups of your /home. Thats good practice for every desktop environment.

That sounds like a usecase for distrobox or toolbx, and not something an average user would need to consider for choosing a distro

I agree with you, that the future of Desktop Linux are the atomic Distros. They are more stable and require less intervention, so they can be used more easily by less knowledgeable users and users who prefer a stable OS(in the non-breaking way, not no updates). Making Linux more accessible for new users, is exactly what Linux needs.

I disagree on your view about the Fedora atomic spins, especially universal blue. Who cares if the underlying OS downloads as one big image. It all happens in the background, you don’t notice that. Everytime you reboot, you are on an updated system.

I mean those are just github release notes, they kind of are supposed to get to the point quickly. More information for new features is typically provided via the official blog. :)

You might be pleased to hear that it’s released for ios. https://feddit.de/post/11733855

If someone is interested in the atomic concept, i would recommend looking into uBlue. It offers the Fedora atomic spins with a lot of tweaks applied that take the user experience to another level. Everything is just hassle free. Highly recommended! There are separate images with tweaks for gamers and developers.