This post will help to provide historical context and demystify what’s under the hood of Heads, PureBoot, and other tools to provide Trusted Boot.
I will not be presenting anything new in this article; I merely hope to provide a historical timeline and a curated list of resources.
Intro
The Librem Key cryptographically verifies the system’s integrity and flashes red if it’s detected tampering
I’ve always felt bad about two things:
Because I run QubesOS, I usually disable “Secure Boot” on my laptop I travel a lot, and I don’t have a good way to verify the integrity of my laptop (eg from an Evil Maid that gains physical access to my computer)
To address this, I have turned to Heads and PureBoot — a collection of technologies including an open-source firmware/BIOS, TPM, and a USB security key that can cryptographically verify the integrity of the lowest firmware (and up the chain to the OS).
While Purism has written many articles about PureBoot and has some (minimal) documentation, I found they did a lot of hand waving without explaining how the technology works (what the hell is a “BIOS measurement”?). So I spent a great deal of . . . → Read More: Trusted Boot (Anti-Evil-Maid, Heads, and PureBoot)
This guide will show you how to generate and view XHProf reports of your WordPress Site.
This is useful so you can drill-down and see exactly how many microseconds each of your scripts and functions (themes & plugins) are running when generating a page — slowing down your website visitors’ page load speed.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
This article will describe how you can utilize GitHub Actions to scan user-contributed PRs for unicode and automatically warn you if such commits contain (potentially invisible & malicious) unicode characters.
Why
Last month Trojan Source was published — which described how malicious unicode characters could make source code appear benign, yet compile to something quite malicious.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
This article will present a few simple website availability monitoring solutions for tor onion services.
Problem
So you’ve just setup an Onion Service for your website, but how often do you actually check that it’s working? Maybe it’s a .onion alias to an existing website, and you usually only check it on the clearnet. What’s to prevent the darknet presence of your website from going down for weeks without you noticing?
Indeed, it’s important to monitor your .onion websites so that you can discover and fix issues before your customers do. But how? Most of the popular uptime monitoring solutions (pingdom, freshping, statuscake, etc) certainly can’t monitor .onion websites.
This guide will enumerate some solutions for monitoring .onion websites, so you get an email alert if your site goes down.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
This article will describe how to point a .onion domain at your existing wordpress sites (on wordpress multisite) so that your website will be accessible both on the clearnet and directly on the darknet via a .onion domain.
Intro
There are numerous security benefits for why millions of people use tor every day. Besides the obvious privacy benefits for journalists, activists, cancer patients, etc — Tor has a fundamentally different approach to encryption (read: it’s more secure).
Instead of using the untrustworthy X.509 PKI model, all connections to a v3 .onion address is made to a single pinned certificate that is directly correlated to the domain itself (the domain is just a hash of the public key + some metadata).
Moreover, some of the most secure operating systems send all the user’s Internet traffic through the Tor network — for the ultimate data security & privacy of its users.
In short, your users are much safer communicating to your site using a .onion domain than its clearnet domain.
For all these reasons, I wanted to make all my wordpress sites directly available to tor users. Unfortunately, I found that it’s not especially easy to point a .onion domain at . . . → Read More: WordPress Multisite on the Darknet (Mercator .onion alias)
This website is now accessible on the darknet. And how!
Why
Fun fact: the most popular website on the darknet is facebook. There are hundreds of other popular sites on the darknet, including debian, the CIA, the NYT, the BBC, ProPublica, and–now–michaelaltfield.net.
All of these organizations chose to make their websites available over .onion addresses so their website will be accessible from millions of daily tor users without leaving the darknet. Besides the obvious privacy benefits for journalists, activists, cancer patients, etc — Tor has a fundamentally different approach to encryption (read: it’s more secure).
Instead of using the untrustworthy X.509 PKI model, all connections to a v3 .onion address is made to a single pinned certificate that is directly correlated to the domain itself (the domain is just a hash of the public key + some metadata).
Moreover, some of the most secure operating systems send all the user’s Internet traffic through the Tor network — for the ultimate data security & privacy of its users.
In short, your users are much safer communicating to your site using a .onion domain than its clearnet domain.
This post will describe how add translations (i18n), pdf/epub builds, and branch-specific versioned documentation to a Read-the-Docs-themed sphinx site hosted with GitHub Pages and built with GitHub’s free CI/CD tools.
This is part two of a two-part series. Before reading this, you should already be familiar with Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (1/2).
ⓘ Note: If you don’t care about how this works and you just want to make a functional repo, you can just fork my ‘rtd-github-pages’ GitHub repo.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
