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semisol
52b4a076bcbbbdc3a1aefa3735816cf74993b1b8db202b01c883c58be7fad8bd
👨‍💻 software developer 🔒 secure element firmware dev 📨 nostr.land relay all opinions are my own.

I must be fair here, the risk is way lower than you think.

Buses like USB and NFC are pretty simple under the hood and aren’t the cause of attacks.

Usually, it is the OS’ fault for trusting any device what it is (like a keyboard), or trying to go too fast, using things like DMA which if misconfigured can be exploited.

On microcontrollers it is pretty easy to audit the entire stack.

It is impossible to execute an attack via USB/NFC/whatever alone and requires either a high attack surface by the firmware developer or a backdoor.

The Frostsnap device has no secure element and my interactions with the authors make me feel like that they do not fully understand security.

Their security model is the same as assuming a paper backup.

There are ways to exfiltrate data through a QR or SD card airgap. SD card is easiest; write to hidden blocks.

QRs can be modulated in other ways such as delay time, intentional error faults, or other choices.

There is also the fact that anything that exists emits EMI, and the Coldcard is no exception. This can be abused to create signals that contain your seed + can be detected at quite a distance using a box the size of a Pi.

The secure elements in the products have had attacks done on them several times. The maker of the SE chips only released incremental updates that do not fix the fundamental flaw.

The original company that made the SE IC is long defunct too. It’s like maintaining an old codebase with no one around.

There are also several critical flaws in the design of the Coldcard that allow undetectable supply chain attacks.

Time for the occasional disclosure:

1. I have not signed any agreements that restrict me from sharing my own opinions.

2. I have not accepted any form of funding, donations or investment that had conditions, written down or informal.

3. I am the sole operator of this account and all content posted here is solely mine.

nostr:note1atm5f3m5rgmpwe6kflft962c0dfpxrnudqz02lgtu6dlawqtq56s6hps25

Though many influencers can’t say who did it because they have been forced to sign non-disparagement agreements in exchange for 💰

We all know who did it.

That is because when you zap Primal users from Primal it is just changing a number in a DB. And more use Primal than not.

I also think that they show the zap symbol first, and the zap happens in the background

That doesn’t mean I have to put my standards in the NIPs repo. Amethyst for example implements several Damus specs that are not NIPs and somehow it still works.

There are entire accounts here dedicated to stealing content that earn more zaps than many Nostr devs.

The uploader tool you are using is the cause, I have not been able to reproduce this issue with yt-dlp

For certain tasks the local/cloud LLM gap is still large.

Considering the costs of maintaining my own server if I only use it 1% of the time, plus the value of my time, I do not care enough to run many things locally.

You seem to be busy asking ICANN for permission to get those IP addresses of yours, while completely not realizing ccTLDs exist...

Primal and Damus are charging fees for their services just like Synonym will start charging people money to host their own homeserver or get extra premium hosting or some crap.

At Nostr.land I charge a fee to host content. Like it? Pay for it. Don't like it? Self host your own, no one forces you to use a paid service

Communism works when all actors are ideal and do not have an incentive to abuse the system, aka never

Not to mention there will always be underperforming people and those need to be selected out by some means. Fairness and equality are not the same

What I meant there was security keys before resident credentials. The paragraph after that explains it.