Featured Articles

Trusted Boot (Anti-Evil-Maid, Heads, and PureBoot)
Hardening Guide for phpList
Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (2/2)
WordPress Multisite on the Darknet (Mercator .onion alias)
Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)
Crowdfunding on Crowd Supply (Review of my experience)
Detecting (Malicious) Unicode in GitHub PRs
WordPress Profiling with XHProf (Debugging & Optimizing Speed)
Introducing BusKill: A Kill Cord for your Laptop
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WordPress Multisite on the Darknet (Mercator .onion alias)

How to use a .onion with Wordpress Multisite

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)

We’re on the Darknet! Visit this site at our tor .onion

Visit this site on our .onion

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.

michaelahgu3sqef5yz3u242nok2uczduq5oxqfkwq646tvjhdnl35id.onion

michaelahgu 3sqef5yz3u2 42nok2uczdu q5oxqfkwq64 6tvjhdnl35i     d.onion

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.

For all these reasons, I
. . . → Read More: We’re on the Darknet! Visit this site at our tor .onion

Mitigating Poisoned PGP Certificates (CVE-2019-13050)

Cert Flooding Featured Image

This article will describe PGP Certificate Flooding attacks as well as inform the reader

How to detect if you have a poisoned certificate in your keyring, How to identify & clean the poisoned cert, and How to update the configuration to prevent it from importing poisoned certs in the future

Last month, an attacker spammed several high-profile PGP certificates with tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of signatures (CVE-2019-13050) and uploaded these signatures to the SKS keyservers.

Without looking very deep, I quickly stumbled on 4 keys that were attacked last month:

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Mitigating Poisoned PGP Certificates (CVE-2019-13050)

Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser (3/3)

Site-Specific Ephemeral Firefox featured image showing a firewall between the facebook and firefox icons

This article is a part 3/3 of a series describing how to setup an Ephemeral Firefox session as a Site-Specific Browser. The ultimate goal is to be able to have a self-destructing browsing session that can only access a single company’s services, such as Google or Facebook.

Part 1/3: Ephemeral Firefox in Ubuntu Part 2/3: Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions Part 3/3: Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser

After setting up the Site-Specific Ephemeral Firefox Browser, you can then blacklist services designated to your Site-Specific browser(s) (such as Google or Facebook) from your main browser. This significantly improves your ability to browse the internet without your activity being tracked by these companies — leaving your sensitive data vulnerable to being stolen by hackers.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser (3/3)

Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions (2/3)

icon of ephemeral firefox with icons of popular extensions below it

I recently posted about how to create a sandboxed firefox profile to compartmentalize (and shred) your firefox browsing history in an Ephemeral Firefox session. But so far I’ve only covered how to create a simple vanilla firefox profile. What if you want your Ephemeral Firefox to include a few basic extensions?

This post will cover how to add extensions to your Ephemeral Firefox profile.

Part 1/3: Ephemeral Firefox in Ubuntu Part 2/3: Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions Part 3/3: Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions (2/3)

Ephemeral Firefox in Ubuntu (1/3)

ephemeral firefox

This post will describe how to create an Ephemeral Firefox session. The ultimate goal of an Ephemeral Firefox session is to unlink your browsing sessions day-to-day and reduce tracking via fingerprinting.

Part 1/3: Ephemeral Firefox in Ubuntu Part 2/3: Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions Part 3/3: Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser

This technique can also be used to compartmentalize your internet activity by using the Ephemeral Firefox session as a Site Specific Browser. This can be especially useful for websites that are infamous for tracking users across the internet and selling the data they collect. For example, you can blacklist all facebook domains in your main browser and only use Ephemeral Firefox sessions that have been whitelisted exclusively for facebook domains–effectively compartmentalizing your facebook activity from the rest of your internet activity.

Another great use-case for an Ephemeral Firefox is for public access computers such as those at libraries, hotels, and printing shops.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Ephemeral Firefox in Ubuntu (1/3)

Detect outgoing port blocking with nmap and portquiz.net

This post will describe how to detect if your network is blocking outgoing ports. In this test, we’ll be using nmap and the fine website portquiz.net

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Detect outgoing port blocking with nmap and portquiz.net

Detecting Censorship or ISP Network Tampering with OONI

This article will introduce a tool to detect censorship or network tampering using the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) android app, which is part of the Tor Project.

The OONI project’s mission is to collect data on network providers to determine where the Internet is free and where it’s being manipulated. For example, the OONI Explorer displays a world map of such data.

On the OONI explorer, you can drill-down on the world map into a specific country to get a list of websites that were detected as being blocked from within that country.

For example, when I looked at the history of OONI probe runs within the US, I saw a list of the usual suspects: gambling sites, pornography sites, torrenting sites, etc. More surprising (at least to me) was the number of pastebin sites that were banned. And, despicably, there was a network in the US blocking The Internet Archive

When I looked at the data from scans within another great “free country” = India, I saw a lot of cherry-picked censorship on facebook and news articles as it relates to the 2017 genocide of Rohingya Refugees in Burma and various muslim/hindu conflicts.

Anyone
. . . → Read More: Detecting Censorship or ISP Network Tampering with OONI

Bypassing Check Point firewall DPI Tor-blocking

This article will describe how to bypass censorship from within any network that uses firewalls using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) built by the Israeli software company Check Point Software Technologies Ltd, such as is being used by the Miami-Dade’s Public Library System to censor on their public wifi.

I’ve been very fortunate to live in a country where freedom of speech is a well-protected human right and censorship is generally unaccepted. But, I’ve long been aware that many States prefer to assert their control over their citizens by controlling their available information. One of the shining achievements from the Tor Project is a system that allows these unfortunate souls to be able to bypass these censors and access the unfettered Internet. Indeed, the UN affirmed that a State’s attempt to prevent or disrupt dissemination of information online is a violation of international human rights law, as defined by article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Of course, many States today continue to ban access to the Tor network. In response, Tor provided hidden entry-points called bridge relays that are harder to block. In response to Tor bridges, States purchased firewalls from companies like Check Point to analyze the
. . . → Read More: Bypassing Check Point firewall DPI Tor-blocking