Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository (f-droid.org)

submitted 1 year ago by naut@infosec.pub to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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[–] nodsocket@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How do I know a Boinc project doesn't have malware?

[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

BOINC has been around for decades and no project containing malware has ever happened. Ultimately you have to trust the BOINC project you are running code from. Most of them are run out of major universities or research institutes.
BOINC also features code-signing to prevent mitm attacks or somebody breaking into a project server and distributing malware that way. Projects are encouraged to keep the signing keys on an offline machine or at least a different machine, which probably generally is what happens. Most developers do their coding work on one machine and then publish that to a server. Using your server for development would be inconvenient and questionable practice.
With Android specifically, I don't know the extent to which malware could even do anything as there's built-in sandboxing.
BOINC does also have a sandboxed mode available on Windows, but it will prevent BOINC from using your GPU if you want it to do that. On Linux, BOINC typically runs as an unprivileged user.