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Thank you for the detailed write up.

I’m was thinking about building native windows UI, wrapping around cross platform library written in swift. I did not know it was that messy and complicated.


I don't think it was a confirmed story. That is, the tiny "grain of rice" size Ethernet module that CEO of a security audit company allegedly found, was not present in other SuperMicro servers. SuperMicro itself, as well as it's buggest customers did not confirm the findings.

From what i recall, the story was very vague, there were no pictures of the specific chip, no pictures of the motherboard of the motherboard that would include serial, i.e. no details that would accompany a serious security research.


Did they originally say it was a grain of rice Ethernet module?

I thought it was supposed to be an incredibly tiny micro sitting on the bmc's boot flash to break inject vulnerabilities.


I recall, at the time Bloomberg and their source were taking about tiny chip on the bmc that was masking as a resistor.

However they did not produce any concrete evidence, citing NDA between that security company and their client.


Even that makes little sense.

A malicious modification to the flash content would leave no physical evidence…


The only photo I saw of the "hidden Ethernet module" was a ceramic RF filter or diplexer, basically a passive $2 part that does nothing on its own, and that would have stuck out like a sore thumb if actually installed in the area where it was depicted.

Just a random surface-mount component that someone pulled off another board or found on the floor behind a workbench. Allegedly.


100%! Lots of issues are only discovered when enough code has been written. More than that , other issues are discovered only when the project is actually deployed as MVP.

TDD helps a lot, but it’s no guarantee - LLM is smart enough to “fake” the code to pass tests .

I’m working on project - a password manager, where I have full end to end test harnesses - cli client makes changes, sync them to the server and then observe the data in iOS app running in the emulator. More than once I noticed codex just hard coded expected values from the test harnesses directly into UI layout in iOS app to make the test pass…

Similar issues in the crypto layer - tests were written first , then code was written . During the review I noticed that the code was made to just pass the test - the logic was to check if signature values exists instead of checking if crypto signature is valid.

LLM can help with code reviews as well, but it has to be guided specifically what to look for for. This is with codex 5.4 model


I’m at level 6 according to this article. I have solid harness, but I still need to review the code so I can understand how to plan for the next set of changes .

Also, I’m struggling to take it to multiple agents level, mostly because things depend on each other in the project - most changes cut across UI, protocol and the server side, so not clear how agents would merge incompatible versions.

Verification is a tricky part as well, all tests could be passing, including end to end integration and visual tests, but my verification still catches things like data is not persisted or crypto signatures not verified.


I've glanced over the article - I think using SQLCypher makes sense if it benefits Keepass project internally, meaning makes it easier to implement new features or fix bugs.

I do not see how it would benefits end users in any significant way. Sure, you can look inside the database, how many people need that?

Dumping the database to CSV is not a good backup, schema changes over time, what was dumped from one version of the app would not work for importing into another version if schema changes. Backup it needs a versioned schema format, which would actually look like KDBX format if implemented in XML :-)


I'm working on an alternative to KeePass/KeepassXC called Lockstep - it is local-first password manager that supports sync natively.

It uses SQLCypher as local data store and keeps KeePass-compatible data model - supports import of .kdbx database.

SQLCypher and different schema used in Lockstep alone did not solve any problems that I have with Keepass. Those problems are sync and sharing.

Solving sync and sharing cannot be done on whole database file level, as it implemented now in KeePass. Changes need to be tracked at the password record level, all changes need to persisted as operations log and that log needs to be distributed across devices.

The above means writing a whole protocol, and that's a lot more work than changing local storage.

The project is pre-alfa https://github.com/lockstepvault-hq/lockstep


I'm working on an alternative that I hope would be better. https://github.com/lockstepvault-hq/lockstep (early alfa project)

Would you mind sharing what user experiences are not ideal with 1Password, I'd like to know I can address those those in Lockstep.


I'd say it's mainly to do with browser/iOS plugins not being responsive. I find myself often resorting to opening the app and copying and pasting the password or other info because autofill function doesn't work on different websites.

Otherwise minor UI things like categories on the sidebar which made it easy to navigate, but they got rid of it a while back.

Good luck with your project!


I'm building an alternative called Lockstep: KeePass-like local-first password vault but with build sync https://github.com/lockstepvault-hq/lockstep

Sync requires a server, however server does not see any secret data, it is only used to relay encrypted hash-chained ops log between devices. It's intended to be self-hosting friendly - server is single binary backed by SQLite.

It's project is early-alfa, CLI app, Keepass import and sever/sync work for the most part, there is MacOS app in progress and plans for a iOS app and a browser extension.

Not ready for production and it's not audited.

I'm currently using KeepassXC/Keepasium with Syncting, but I want a better solution - something that supports trouble-free sync natively and allows me to own the system


That sounds awesome, and I personally want to self-host nothing. I do enough of that at work.


I do not want to self host either, for exactly the same reasons.

However, I do want to have full control of my secret data beyond the secrets themselves, ideally w/out self hosting, i.e. I want to have crypto-proven control over whom I'm sharing secrets with, I want to have have cryto-level assurance that the service cannot use recovery/escrow mechanism to unlock my secrets data stored on the cloud w/out my consent.

Apple Passwords comes closest to what I want, but it's not cross platform.


I'm going to follow your project, it looks good. It's "alpha" btw. I wouldn't usually correct but as you're posting about something you want people to look at you might be interested in a correction.


Working on MacOS app that detects an active meeting in one of the commonly used apps and then turns on a LED "presence" light. The purpose to let others know that you are "on air" at this moment.

Current release candidate supports detecting Teams Meeting and Slack Huddle.

https://github.com/kantselovich/LuxaforPresence/pull/3


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