There’s been some Friday night kernel drama on the Linux kernel mailing list… Linus Torvalds has expressed regrets for merging the Bcachefs file-system and an ensuing back-and-forth between the file-system maintainer.

  • nous@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    4 months ago

    How does that work? Encryption should not care at all about the data that is being encrypted. It is all just bytes at the end of the day, should not matter if they are compressed or not.

    • ThanksForAllTheFish@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      4 months ago

      Disabling compression in HTTPS is advised to prevent specific attacks, but this is not about compression weakening encryption directly. Instead, it’s about preventing scenarios where compression could be exploited to compromise security. The compression attack is used to leak information about the content of the encrypted data, and is specific to HTTP, probably because HTTP has a fixed or guessable structure.

      • nous@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        4 months ago

        Looks to be an exploit only possible because compression changes the length of the response and the data can be injected into the request and is reflected in the response. So an attacker can guess the secret byte by byte by observing a shorter response form the server.

        That seems like something not feasible to do to a storage device or anything that is encrypted at rest as it requires a server actively encrypting data the attacker has given it.

        We should be careful of seeing a problem in one very specific place and then trying to apply the same logic to everything broadly.