What are the cybersecurity weaknesses of the Fediverse?

Most of us are Reddit refugees, and probably clicking more random links than we ever did before on websites we’ve never seen before. This whole experience feels like the old internet, but also throws up insane red flags with a modern internet perspective. What are the cybersecurity weaknesses we should all be looking for, and what are the best practices?

Here’s my reason for posting this. As I search for new communities across instances to follow, I sometimes end up clicking a link and I’m no longer logged in. In the corner, that could be a Sign In link or it could be phishing. It’s likely due to me not understanding how to properly navigate this system, but there’s nothing stopping someone from setting up a sight like this as far as I know.

Thoughts?

ShittyKopper, (edited )

There seems to be a fair bit of admins who just run the Lemmy Ansible installer expecting to magically have an instance, and having no idea what they’re getting themselves into.

I wonder how many small Lemmy instances exist right now that have SSH password auth (or god forbid root login of any kind) enabled.

kaseijin,

Third party apps present a username and password field to log into a Lemmy instance. They can easily just steal your credentials. There are standard auth flows to solve this problem. The fact that Lemmy devs have willfully ignored this issue for years, and that they aren’t warning users not to trust third party apps, lead me to believe they don’t really care about security, which is the biggest red flag. There’s finally an open github issue that seems to be acknowledged, but it’ll be some time before this feature (if ever) ever gets implemented.

-Posted from a third-party app; yea, i gave them my password blindly.

skullgiver,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

This is something I really like Mastodon for. The good apps will go through standard OAuth authentication rather than username/password authentication, which also means you can use passkeys/2FA to protect your account which apps often don’t bother implementing in any way.

That said, who’s to say the in-app browser window you’re entering your password into is really your browser and not just a malicious Chrome build the evil app developers added to mislead you? There’s a slightly elevated risk with storing your password in every app, but malicious app developers will be able to phish you regardless.

Blunon,

The way Reddit did this was by just giving out a token, that could be done in the same way here on lemmy, I think that would solve the issue.

Now it’s true that you will be redirected to the site (here lemmy) but that’s the same on all services, as a user one needs to check the host name and certificate of the site they’re directed to.

Ech,

There’s finally an open github issue that seems to be acknowledged, but it’ll be some time before this feature (if ever) ever gets implemented.

Fwiw, the devs seem quite open to (even directly requesting) people coding features they want and having them added into the main code in future versions. So if anyone is able and willing to make a working version of that for Lemmy, it could be added quite soon, really.

czarrie,
@czarrie@lemmy.world avatar

I suspect what will happen with the Federated universe as a whole is what happened to Linux - companies will start using the products, contribute to them, and it becomes this weird corporate/open source hybrid as the main devs, however good, simply won’t have the same level of resources as say FAANG to throw at these problems

deadsuperhero,
@deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml avatar

Honestly, I think the #1 problem to be concerned about right now is that there a lot of people self-hosting for the very first time, that maybe don’t really have much experience with hosting or moderation. It’s tough! There can be a lot of drama, random software failures, lost data, and disappointments that can happen. An instance can go under at random, at any time.

It sounds bad. In practice, the day-to-day can be fairly smooth sailing. A lot of people just kind of need the experience, need to make sure they’re not the one person moderating thousands of people on a serer. Making sure that moderation is a community effort, that the server has backups, and that there are channels for donations to support the instance - those things go a long way towards long-term stability.

gvasco,
  • Use a mail forwarding service to generate disposable e-mails used to sign up, if you accidentally give it to someone else it doesn’t expose any other accounts and can be easily replaced by a new one.
  • Use a password manager to ensure a strong and unique password.
  • Use a JavaScript blocker so you only allow the required JavaScript to make the website work and prevent automatic downloads.

I’ve been doing these in general recently and it’s good privacy a security practice. Also slowly replacing my main e-mail address in different service accounts with disposable forwarding e-mail addresses.

Edit: Other than that read a bit more about Lemmy and fediverse workings, verify what instance you’re viewing and navigate to the desired community via your instance as others have mentioned.

KoboldCoterie,
@KoboldCoterie@pawb.social avatar

If you’re navigating to another community on their instance, you won’t be logged in. When you’re seeing that, check the URL. If you’re on lemmy.ml, you’re still on your instance; if not, you’ve navigated to that instance.

There’s multiple ways to structure links, some of which will take you to that community via your instance, some not.

Could it be phishing? Sure. But far more likely, you’re just on another instance where you don’t have an account (or at least an active login).

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