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by nonrandomstring 839 days ago
> Such links are very useful in an 'it's OK to have security match the use case'

I think you give the most sensible summary. It's about "appropriate and proportional" security for the ease of use trade-off.

> the user now has a link to a photo, they could reshare but i trust they won't intentionally do this.

Time limits are something missing from most applications to create ephemeral links. Ideally you'd want to choose from something like 1 hour, 12 hours, 24 hours, 72 hours... Just resend if they miss the message and it expires.

A good trick is to set a cron job on your VPS to clear /www/tmp/ at midnight every other day.

> The big issue here isn't the links imho. It's the security analysis tools scanning all links a user received via email

You have to consider anything sent to a recipient of Gmail, Microsoft, Apple - any of the commercial providers - to be immediately compromised. If sending between private domains on unencrypted email then it's immediately compromised by your friendly local intelligence agency. If using PGP or am E2E chat app, assume it _will_ be compromised at the end point eventually, so use an ephemeral link.