Hacker News Reader

Comment by joekrill | Hacker News Reader

How could this even possibly be mitigated, though? At some point you have to trust something, right? This argument could extend all the way down to your OS, chipset, whatever. Unless you've built every part of your machine from scratch it's always going to rely on trusting a component you know nothing about.

View on HN

If you include this code in firefox itself, you can review the code and verify that the official firefox binaries use that code.

But what about the code you run to verify the binaries? You have to trust that. Or are you reviewing every bit by hand?

Trusting the binary is a one-time effort. Here you have to trust the JS everytime you authenticate.

Even one-time, comparing the hash of a git commit or an installer is annoying but practically doable. I'd have no idea how to safely do something like this for a website. And I for sure ain't able to audit those ~200kb js by myself.

But my point is you also have to trust that your underlying OS, or chipset, or even some other software on your computer doesn't have some way to thwart the entire effort. If the thing you're using the do your verification is itself compromised, then you're just as screwed.

So you never update Firefox? For most users it automatically updates itself.

For this use case, authenticating is a one-time effort as well, per browser. If you're authenticating again, you're almost certainly doing it on a different device/browser, at which point you'd have to verify the new browser binary anyways.

Sign-ins to Firefox Accounts (used to access Mozilla services as web pages) don’t expire after some time? I didn’t know that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com