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Emergency PIN with a full decoy environment - ONYX v1.5-beta (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.world
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ONYX v1.5-beta: Emergency PIN with a full decoy environment

Released v1.5-beta of ONYX, and one of the things we added is Emergency PIN support.

A secondary PIN opens a completely separate decoy environment instead of your real account. You configure what's in it — chats, avatars, display names — so it looks like a normal, lived-in account. There's no visual indicator that it's a decoy.

The use case is straightforward: situations where you're pressured into unlocking your messenger. The Emergency PIN is kept entirely separate from your main PIN and can be changed at any time.

Happy to answer questions.

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[–] [S] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

On mobile the key comes from the platform keychain — tied to device unlock, not the app. On desktop it's machine-derived. The decoy PIN threat model is coercion — someone watching you unlock. If an attacker already has filesystem access, you've got bigger problems than the PIN.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Machine derived decryption key is basically the same as unencrypted.

    Android story is better, but you effectively hold a backdoor. You can push an update that defeats the decryption without any user interaction.

    Ideally, decryption should involve the user inputting a pin or password.

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