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 post will outline recommended steps to harden phpList after install to make it reasonably secure.
phpList is the most popular open-source software for managing mailing lists. Like wordpress, they have a phplist.com for paid hosting services and phplist.org for free self-hosting.
Earlier this week, it was announced that phpList had a critical security vulnerability permitting an attacker to bypass authentication and login as an administrator using an incorrect & carefully-crafted password in some cases. This bug is a result of the fact that [a] PHP is a loosely typed language and [b] the phpList team was using the ‘==‘ operator to test for equality of the user’s hashed password against the DB. This security pitfall has been known in PHP since at least 2010 (a decade ago!), but I’m sure the same mistake will be made again..
Indeed, security is porous. There’s no such thing as 100% vulnerability-free code, and phpList is no exception. But if we’re careful in adding layers of security to our infrastructure, then we might be able to protect ourselves from certain 0-days.
That said, here’s my recommended steps to making your phpList install reasonably secure.
As stated in my last post, my server died several months ago, and I decided to take that unfortunate opportunity to gain some Unix experience by installing FreeBSD on its replacement. Although this server has been installed for several months, the main reason that this weblog has been down is because of multiple configuration issues with FreeBSD that, frankly, I think should have worked Out Of The Box.
A friend of mine who is adamant about FreeBSD told me to name this inevitable post “FreeBSD from a gentoo user’s perspective.” It’s true that my desktop’s distro of choice has been gentoo for several years, but I’m no ricer. I love gentoo because I love portage–the gentoo package manager which is, in fact, a derivative of FreeBSD’s ports package manager. I don’t care much for any package manager that doesn’t give you the option to change compile-time options. Anyway, I’m going to try my best to leave any bias-ness I may have behind me as I work through the multitude of flaws that I encountered with setting up a FreeBSD webserver.
As a gentoo user, I can understand the expected perils of using a system that is designed to have both . . . → Read More: FreeBSD Perils
Well, my old server died (I think the processor fried itself somehow). Due to school workload, I wasn’t able to properly configure a new server until now, thereby this blog has been down for months (and, surprisingly, I’ve actually had people comment about it being down–mostly because they were unable to flame me, though *shrug*).
Anyway, I’ve finally got a new (actually, it’s quite old) rack-mountable server (minus the rack) running FreeBSD as a replacement. Moreover, I’ve changed the theme, so this site had both a different software and hardware look!
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
About Michael
tech.michaelaltfield.net/
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
