zeitgeist team mailing list archive

["J.P. Lacerda" <jpaflacerda@xxxxxxxxx>]

First off, thanks to Jacob for taking the time to provide such complete
use cases / examples / API suggestions, these are much appreciated! I
agree that this is an issue which needs to be tackled. The crux of the
matter, as outlined by Jacob, is that Zeitgeist is enabled by default in
11.04, while encryption of /home is optional. As thekorn and RainCT,
said, encrypting activity.sqlite isn't the solution to all of our
problems, but at least it rules out some attack vectors. I feel like
this would be a good start (I'll package sqlcipher tonight).

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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.