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Sure, but that should really be a permission you have to grant explicitly. For global keyboard shortcuts an app should make commands available and it should be

• badsectoracula 5y ago
  > Sure, but that should really be a permission you have to grant explicitly. That could work but still feels dodgy since if you can grant that permission to a clipboard manager, you can also grant it to something like a TikTok client or an Adobe DRM reader or whatever else program you want to use (ie. the reason you are using your computer in the first place) but also might want to snoop for your data. IMO a better solution that wouldn't break existing clipboard usage is to have a second "secure" clipboard that you can lock as tight as you want with explicit permissions for reading it, notifications for writing to it and whatever else you want. Then password managers would copy data to that and text editors and browsers can have a "Copy Sensitive Data" (or something better worded) in addition to "Copy" that will place data there. Sure some people will still use Copy but some people will also stick post-it notes with their passwords on their monitors and give thousands of dollars to Nigerian princes - you shouldn't to punish everyone for the ignorance of a few. > For global keyboard shortcuts an app should make commands available and it should be up to the user to tell their OS which shortcuts they want to give an app. Not just for security, but also for customisability and to avoid conflicts This only works if all applications are using the same framework and toolkit and target the same OS. Meanwhile notice how even when you limit yourself to applications targeting Windows alone there are tons of different frameworks - let alone cross platform applications that tend to use a lowest common denominator approach. IMO if you want to get more secure functionality, you need to do it in a way that works alongside existing practice - hence containers and sandboxing for untrusted applications working alongside trusted applications that can do what they want. Unless you start everything from scratch on a brand new computing approach (like mobiles did and even then it barely works and despite people treating mobiles almost like consumables), trying to force a top-down approach to security is doomed to fail.
  • laumars 5y ago
    > IMO a better solution that wouldn't break existing clipboard usage is to have a second "secure" clipboard that you can lock as tight as you want with explicit permissions for reading it, notifications for writing to it and whatever else you want. If we are going to break standard APIs then why not do away with the clipboard for secrets entirely and have a global secrets store that applications can pull credentials from directly and securely instead of passing secrets via a clear text protocol. This is how Linux and macOS work (albeit I wish 3rd party stores could natively integrate with them). This is how cloud computing works too (eg AWS Secrets Manager). Using a clipboard for copying secrets is completely the wrong approach regardless of how much you over-engineer your clipboard manager.
    • badsectoracula 5y ago
      Note that what i refer to is not about breaking any standard API but adding a secondary one that is explicitly about secret/sensitive stuff. Current applications will of course be still using the clipboard but the situation wont be any worse than it currently is and new applications as well as applications currently active development can be made to use the new one, so things can be better. IMO this is a much better approach and way more likely to be adopted than anything that breaks existing applications and workflows. Also while people use passwords as an example, this is just an example. What you are copying can be some secret government-issued number (that you can't replace with anything else), some sensitive photo or anything else that you want to be exact at both ends of the operation. If the source of the data to be placed in the secure clipboard (for lack of a better name) is some encrypted storage (like a local secrets manager) or a plain text file is irrelevant here.
      • laumars 5y ago
        > Note that what i refer to is not about breaking any standard API but adding a secondary one that is explicitly about secret/sensitive stuff. But it still requires developers to use a new API. So why get them to used a half arsed security enclave when you can design a proper secrets store instead? > If the source of the data to be placed in the secure clipboard (for lack of a better name) is some encrypted storage (like a local secrets manager) or a plain text file is irrelevant here. It’s very relevant because: * clipboards are temporary which means you need to copy data into them. This creates an extra step for users to follow as opposed to applications querying the secrets store directly * clipboards don’t have RBAC unlike password stores. Which means any application with permissions to read from the clipboard can read any secret that any other application had written to it. Your solution of having an additional permissions set where you chose which applications have that permission is solved with secrets store where each application only has permission to the secrets it creates. Thus zero risk of leakage * secrets managers are encrypted, clipboard isn’t * secrets managers can store multiple secrets, a clipboard cannot. Thus you then still need to have a secrets manager to copy your password into the clipboard anyway. So why not do away with that middleman entirely? I get the incentive of wanting to “fix” the clipboard but if you’re going to introduce a new API for secrets then you might as well do it properly from the outset.