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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Yep this is exactly right. Too many people are unaware that their votes are not anonymous on Lemmy and blocking the public tool only helps the bad guys who already know this. I’ve always thought this was a major weakness in Lemmy but I don’t have a solution myself without some other major drawback.

    I think probably votes should be anonymized or batched between servers so that only your instance’s admins can see individual votes and you just have to trust the instances you federate with that they aren’t pulling any shenanigans or otherwise defederate. That’s not an easy problem to solve, but it’s not like it’s not currently possible to manipulate votes with a federated server, it would just be harder to detect. Regardless I think the need for privacy wins here.


















  • As another poster mentioned, QubesOS with anti evil maid will work, but that’s the defense against state actors too and is overkill for this threat model.

    BitLocker or any FDE using SecureBoot and PCR 7 will be sufficient for this (with Linux you also need PCRs 8+9 to protect against grub and initramfs attacks). Even if they can replace something in the boot chain with something trusted, it’ll change PCR 7 and you’d be prompted to unlock with a recovery key (don’t blindly enter it without verifying the boot chain and knowing why you’re being prompted).

    With Secure Boot alone, the malicious bootloader would still need to be trusted (something like BlackLotus).

    Also make sure you have a strong BIOS password and disable boot from USB, PXE, and anything else that isn’t the specific EFI bootloader used by your OS(es).



  • Not that it’s my first recommendation for security reasons, and I would never do this in prod, but you can just add the self-signed cert to the local trusted root CA store and it should work fine. No reg changes needed.

    If you do this, put it in the store of the user running the client, not LocalMachine. Then you just need to make sure you connect as something in the cert’s SAN list. An IP might work (don’t know since I never try to put IPs in the SAN list), but just use a hosts entry if you can’t modify local DNS.

    Edit: after reading the full OP post (sorry), I don’t think it’s necessarily the self-signed cert. If the browser is connecting with https:// and presenting a basic auth prompt, then https is working. It almost sounds like there is a 301/302 redirect back to http after login. Check the Network tab of the browser’s dev pane (F12) to see what is going on.