This is an unpopular take because laziness, lack of quality and lack of care are the standards now but "this is how modern internet works" isn't an excuse at all. That's what FOSS is trying to change actually. But I guess the Fediverse is far behind in terms of security now. Not having everything encrypted on a server you don't own is a massive flaw. Privacy as in data mining seems to be a bit better than what Big Tech offers as long as you trust the instance and its server provider though.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 months ago (7 children)

This has nothing to do with the original topic of discussion or Hollo in particular. You're now arguing about pros and cons of using a VPS service. I also have no idea why you keep making statements like "not having everything encrypted on a server you don’t own is a massive flaw". You absolutely can have everything encrypted running a VPS. You don't understand the subject you're discussing.

[–] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 months ago (6 children)

The original discussion was about Hollo but now it's about Mastodon. They're almost the same things anyways. And if you can have everything encrypted on a VPS it does not mean every instance owner (and even every major instance owner) will do it. Here I think we need an official requirement by Mastodon and probably a code integration so it's impossible to have everything decrypted without breaking the federation support. The performance will be cut in half at best but at least IP and metadata mining attacks will be harder to perform.

[–] jeinzi@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

How would encryption even make sense here? Up to the server, everything is protected via TLS. And if you don't trust the server provider, you can encrypt all you want, but they can just read out the RAM of the VPS or they could have backdoored the bare metal hardware to do the same. As long as the server has to somehow work with the data in question, the decryption keys have to be somewhere in there. And what do you mean by code integration? We're talking FOSS here, how could someone prevent me from removing any "is everything encrypted?" checks in Mastodon? Also, what does the encryption on other federated instances even matter? Without having any in depth knowledge about Mastodon, your user agent will hardly be sent to other instances, and when and what you posted is meant to be visible.

[–] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago

Code integration means that all Mastodon data a server stores is automatically encrypted on arrival. But even in that case it can be intercepted on decryption or in RAM as you mentioned. FDE + trustworthy provider can be a good option still. I don't think any providers except the most sketchy ones will try to read the RAM. Anyways all of that is impossible to enforce so we're really waiting for a breach with this one.

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