This article introduces the concept of “3TOFU” — a harm-reduction process when downloading software that cannot be verified cryptographically.
⚠ NOTE: This article is about harm reduction.
It is dangerous to download and run binaries (or code) whose authenticity you cannot verify (using a cryptographic signature from a key stored offline). However, sometimes we cannot avoid it. If you’re going to proceed with running untrusted code, then following the steps outlined in this guide may reduce your risk.
TOFU
TOFU stands for Trust On First Use. It’s a (often abused) concept of downloading a person or org’s signing key and just blindly trusting it (instead of verifying it).
3TOFU
3TOFU is a process where a user downloads something three times at three different locations. If-and-only-if all three downloads are identical, then you trust it.
Why 3TOFU?
The EFF’s Deep Crack proved DES to be insecure and pushed a switch to 3DES.
During the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, it was illegal to export cryptography from the United States. In 1996, after intense public pressure and legal challenges, the government officially permitted export with the 56-bit DES cipher — which was a known-vulnerable cipher.
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.
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
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).
Jesus. It’s only the second week of school and I’ve already pulled my first all-nighter. This time, however, it was not for school. I was determined to get my OpenVPN server properly setup so that I could finally browse the web securely from the dorms. I only expected this to take a few minutes, but I ended up spending over 7 hours of research, troubleshooting, and configuration changes.
This post will contain a slew of information about smoothwall, zerina, openvpn, and iptables. I’m mostly just going to throw all of my findings here without much of any logical flow.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
I’ve wanted to setup a serious linux-based firewall for my home network for some time now, and I finally got around to it yesterday.
There are TON of linux router distros out there, but instead of spending 8 hours picking & choosing, comparing & contrasting, nitpicking & debating, I asked someone else ;). Two buddies of mine have a similar setup at their homes: one uses Smooth Wall; one uses IPCop. I arbitrarily chose Smooth Wall (after actually setting it up, though, I think IPCop would have been a better choice–c’est la vie.
The installation is supposed to be quite painless, and it was–for the most part. The documentation and install process was intuitive and easy to follow, but it didn’t work OOTB. I probably only had so much difficulty because of hardware issues (fried NICs?) which is by no means Smooth Wall’s fault. Nevertheless, it took ~5 hours of bang-your-head-against-the-table troubleshooting ’till I could finally unhook the monitor & keyboard, shove it in a corner, and get some sleep.
I was also disappointed with two things that didn’t work as I had expected OOTB:
DHCP DNS VPN Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and . . . → Read More: Smooth Wall
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
