XMPP Service Operators - 2021-04-08

To follow up on the topic of server location hosting from the other day, I messaged Flokinet and they replied with: we dont care what the US thinks or wants, we follow icelandic law. So why would we care about Third-party doctrine? Thats an US based law / idea. We are not in the US but Iceland. The US is "sniffing" 24/7/365 all data on this planet regardless whch country you host or operate in. Thats why you have to use proper encryption.

right, anything outside the USA the NSA will just gobble up in transit, it's not allowed to do that inside the USA, but any law enforcement is allowed to simply request all data hosted at 3rd parties, so it doesn't need to

I agree, encryption is a must regardless, but hosting at your own house is a added benefit if you can do it

But they collect data from inside the US anyway. They're just not always allowed to use it without a warrant.

Hosting the server yourself only protects you. Anyone else who signs up is signing up at a third party unless they're part owner in the company of "Mopar's XMPP Server, LLC" or whatever.

yep, I'm saying ideally everyone hosts their own server in their house

for themselves and their family

I'm not sure family members, who aren't also admins to any degree, would even be protected. Except maybe a spouse or <18 child.

I guess if someone asked for details from my brother's account via 3rd party doctrine I could at the least tell him :P

Hmm, I guess it depends on the country, but I think often direct relatives (siblings, parents, children) regardless of age are within your right not to be a witness to crime

or however that is called in legalese. IANAL obviously

moparisthebest: > .... I could at the least tell him :P You *could* but you are *not allowed* to do so, as newest law in germany told you since yesterday 😡

ernst.on.tour, you got a link for that?

can be in german

I think if some government wanted data off my server I'd just burn it 😊

back to thermite hosting

You really shouldn't rely on thermite in the age of freely available mature open source full disk encryption

$5 wrenches are also widely available

Instead of burning the disk, which isn't a guarantee the platter, just destroy your key material

Which is only a few bytes in size

And shouldn't be stored on the same storage medium as your ciphertext

Configure a watchdog program to watch the tamper sensors

Most if not all ECC memory zeros itself on reset. If your keys are stored in ram and a tamper switch is tripped you could just immediate reset the server, wiping keys from memory and rendering the confidential data unusable to the attacker

There really is no excuse to not do disk encryption nowadays as even consumer CPUs have hardware acceleration for AES

Yes I didn't mean fire, but delete and overwrite

It prevents some asshole in the datacenter from going over to your server and yoinking out a drive

What also prevents someone from doing that is PLEASE DO install the SECURITY BEZEL the server came with

I know it's just a simple physical lock and key latch mechnism but it does provide a physical barrier from people screwing with your server

Also cages in the datacenter

But those can be expensive

A bezel is free

Rob It takes too long to delete and overwrite terabytes of data

There's also the possibility of recovery

Deploying full disk encryption makes the process of decommissioning drives so much cheaper, as you can even resell the used drives to make a little bit of money back

Without having to worry about a data breach

And my server is at home, but yes I agree. I think if I actually had anything to hide and it had to be transmitted digitally I would use a second key pair on a hardware device. But if they really want to get your data they will somehow

You don't have to make it easy for them

And if it's a physical server at your house that's easier because you don't have to implement some kind of remote partial init to ssh in and enter keys and check system integrity you can just walk over to a machine, boot it up, enter keys

There's not just the government to worry about

What happens if someone breaks into you home

Steals your server

Better to think about these things now, than lose sleep when it actually happens and prey and hope that the robber isn't smart enough or doesn't sell your drives to someone smart enough to mount a unix filesystem

True, but I wonder how hard it's going to be moving a btrfs pool to full disk encryption. I've only ever started a new system with it

rob: ZFS has encrypted datasets

Try that

It's also much more mature than btrfs

Doesn't have a write hole