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 ➡
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 ➡
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 ➡
So you’ve just done a fresh install of phplist, but when you attempt to load it in your browser, you get a 500 Internal Server Error. But the error log is empty! It’s possible that phplist is suppressing the errors produced by the included library random_compat. This blog post will describe this possible issue, and how to resolve it.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
In this article, I’ll describe a procedure for preparing a brand-new USB flash drive for use. First we’ll securely erase all the data on the drive, then we’ll encrypt the entire drive, and–finally–we’ll check the drive for bad blocks.
Ah, remember the good-ole days of spinning disks? When your OS could tell your hard *disk* to shred a specific sector? Like it or not, those days are gone in the land of USB flash volumes.
There’s a lot of great reads on the complications of securely erasing data on a USB thumb drive. Unfortunately, a lot of the techniques are not universal to all technologies or manufacturers. Consequently, my approach is more ignorant, straight-forward, and broad (at the risk of causing these cheap usb drives to fail sooner & the process taking longer):
First, I make sure never to write any unencrytped data to the disk Second, when I want to wipe the disk, I fill it entirely with random data
Below are the commands that I use to prepare a new usb drive for my use immediately after purchase. These commands are presented as a rough guide; they’re mostly idempotent, but you probably want to copy & paste them . . . → Read More: New Thumb Drive Encryption Procedure
Today I discovered how to validate the Public Key Algorithm that’s used for a given gpg key. Unfortunately, it’s extremely unintuitive & took quite a bit of digging to figure out how. So I’m leaving this here in hopes it helps someone in their future searches.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
This post will describe what hardware to buy & how to configure it so that you have 2 wireless networks in your house: One that seamlessly forces all of the traffic on that network through a VPN–and one that connects to the Internet normally . When finished, the internet activity for any device connected to the first network will be entirely encrypted so that the ISP cannot see which websites are visited*, what software you use, and what information you send & receive on the internet.
* Assuming your config doesn’t leak DNS; see improvements section
Update 2017-08-25: Added “kill switch” firewall rule that prevents LAN traffic from escaping to the ISP unless it passed through the VPN’s vtun0 interface first. Following this change, if the VPN connection is down, the internet will not be accessible (as desired) over the ‘home’ wifi network (without this, the router bypasses the VPN by sending the packets straight to the ISP–giving a false sense of privacy).
This post attempts to answer the following question: If an evesdropper intercepts a message encrypted with gpg, how much information will they be able to extract from the message without a decryption key?
I will show the unencrypted metadata added to a GPG-encypted message, and I will present commands that can be used to extract this unencrypted metadata.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
So, I got into a discussion with a friend of mine in my Computer Security class at UCF about this script. I’m posting this for historical and educational purposes only. As always, I never condone the implementation of any of my content for malicious intent. Moreover, this script has flaws that * would make it useless in such a scenario. Don’t do it!
Here’s a script I hacked up last semester when I was playing with MITM attacks and packet eavesdropping with ettercap:. This scripts will automatically:
fake its MAC Address get a new IP Address collect a list of hosts on the same subnet as itself iterate through and ARP poison: each of these hosts one at a time for 5 minutes each save all data collected in host-specific files in a timestamped directory repeat until the hard drive is full Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
