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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

It's not a good idea, but I don't see how security is a big part of the problem. In particular crying foul about the data being stored in the clear seems silly. How would encrypting it help, when the key has to be right there anyway? Is it that much worse than all the other sensitive data also sitting in the clear in, you know, regular files?

What's the plan, encrypt the data a public key where the private key is locked most of the time? Require a passphrase any time you want to read or process it? Does anyone think that UX will fly? Maybe there's some TPM magic that makes it work without also making it trivial to steal for an attacker who already has arbitrary code execution, but no one is citing that so far. I don't see the better design that everyone seems to think is obviously there. (Besides the obvious Just Don't, which is fair as far as it goes but has nothing to do with crypto)

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Just for example: It could be stored encrypted with the user's credentials. So when you want to browse "Recall" it might pop-up requesting a fingerprint, password, token etc.

Then it decrypts, presents to the user, and closes the handles when you're done. In this way, the "key" isn't present -- the user has it!

That's quite a different security situation to it just sitting around in plaintext on disk. Certainly there's a number of Windows and MacOS features sitting behind authentication already, from a UX perspective.

I don't think users would go for that UX, so if you're committed to building this feature, I don't think you can go that route without basically accepting that no one will use it. I suspect MS wants this to be a lot more casual than the other features behind authentication now. (Like I told akkartik, I'm open to the argument that there's no way to implement it securely and with an acceptably easy UX, but I don't see people actually making that argument.) Maybe they'll prove me wrong by doing something like that, though.

The way I read these arguments is: the lack of security adds to the case against this product. The reviewers aren't saying there's a self-evident solution, just that there are self-evident problems. How did this get through review? So it's not that there are two separate arguments, but that the security issues strengthen the main argument that this is a product that shouldn't exist.

That's a very charitable reading. In my reading, the dismissive tone of the "security" arguments implies there's something obvious that MS should have done better specifically security-wise. If there's no such better implementation, then security has nothing to do with the argument, and they should stop talking about it. If they wanted to make a more nuanced argument about how there's no way to make a secure implementation that provides the smooth UX people will actually use, I would respect that a bit more, but I'm not seeing either that particular claim or the evidence to back it up in the mainstream commentary.

I don't know what else you've read, but in the context of OP in particular it's not clear to me what seems dismissive about the "security" arguments.

It's stronger in the initial coverage, I believe by the guy who discovered the story and the immediate commentary on Mastodon. The Verge is a more professional outfit so they're more subtle about it, but it's still there in phrases like "That could make it trivial for an attacker" (emphasis mine) and "There are clearly some obvious holes". Tone is hard to prove, so I'm probably not going to try any harder than that.

I can totally believe random microblogging takes are stupid, but that doesn't seem worth arguing about. Microblogging is just capturing initial reactions.

> "That could make it trivial for an attacker" (emphasis mine)

It _is_ trivial, right? The attack _is_ trivial. It's the solution that isn't. OP isn't claiming that. Seems reasonable to me.

I went back and reread https://doublepulsar.com/recall-stealing-everything-youve-ev... which is the first link in OP. Again, it doesn't have much to say about encryption at all except to point out that hey, the protections Microsoft is claiming are underwhelming. Without those protections the cost/benefit balance is way out of whack.

While I'm not a fan of the almost forced OOBE setup, I really don't understand the complaining regarding security. It's again another case of if you can run code on my computer you already own it. As Raymond Chen put: "you’re already on the other side of the airtight hatchway. And you’re bragging that you can do something annoying like a denial service, apparently unaware that being on the other side of the airtight hatchway gives you the ability to do far more interesting (and threatening) things".

This kind of "vulnerability" has been a constant topic of his blog in the past:

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