zeitgeist team mailing list archive

[Jacob Appelbaum <jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It is likely that the attack surface here is very large during execution
and the above protection would probably only be useful for data at rest
(sqlcipher) and against key recovery attacks that involve ptrace by non-
root users (on ubuntu).

An attacker will still be able to become a Zeitgeist client and pull the
data out of the database as part of an API call of some sort.

So overall, I think that this limits the attack surface considerably but
without a comprehensive API filter of some kind, it's possible that
malware on the system (or a forensics person who popped a shell) will
still be able to siphon out data.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/787868

Title:
  Encryption of database

Status in Zeitgeist Framework:
  New

Bug description:
  I think that Zeitgeist should encrypt databases in
  ~/.local/share/zeitgeist/* for anti-forensics reasons.

  While someone may happen to use an encrypted disk, Zeitgeist may serve
  as the ultimate accidental spyware to an unsuspecting user. One
  possible mitigation is to randomly generate a reasonable key, tie it
  into the login keychain and then use that key with something like
  http://sqlcipher.net/ rather than straight sqlite.

  In theory, a user will never know that this encryption/decryption is
  happening - no underlying assumptions about the disk need to be made
  to maintain any security guarantees. This should prevent anyone from
  learning the contents of the database without also learning the login
  password. Modern Ubuntu machines disallow non-root ptracing (
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/Roadmap/KernelHardening#ptrace )
  and if the gnome keyring is locked, an attacker would have a much
  harder time grabbing meaningful Zeitgeist data without interacting
  with the user or bruteforcing the login keychain.