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 six months ago, I discovered something on my smartphone that horrified me: I went to undelete a file in DiskDigger, and I stumbled upon a plethora of unexpected jpegs: screenshots of my activity. Screenshots that I didn't take. Screenshots of my conversations. Screenshots of my GPS position. And screenshots of my bitcoin wallet.
I was perplexed. I was astonished. And, to be honest, I was scared. How did this happen? Was it a vulnerability shipped with LineageOS? Could it be some malicious binary embedded into AOSP? Or is it some exploit in one of those damned closed-source apps that I was forced to install through social pressure (*cough* whatsapp)?
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
Whonix 14 just came out last month. I went to update, but I couldn't figure out what version I was currently running. The documentation said to run this command, but the output didn't make sense when I ran it on my whonix-gw TemplateVM.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
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
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 describes how to generate a few backup public key hashes to add to your HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP) config that might save you from bricking your domain if Let's Encrypt ever gets untrusted like StartCom did.
If you have a healthy distrust of the X.509 PKI trust model, then you've probably heard of HPKP (and probably also HSTS & CAA). Website certificate pinning was a trend first started by google, who hard-coded a pin of their certificates in their Chrome browser. Eventually, google helped build a more standardized pinning method under RFC 7469. And today, it's supported by Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.
Pinning is a great TOFU improvement to https, but--if misconfigured--you could "brick" your domain--making it so that your client's browsers will refuse to let them access your site for months or years (interestingly, this has also caused some security experts to think of how HPKP could be abused in ransom-ware). Therefore, it's a good idea to follow a few HPKP Best Practices.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
