Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: Baraka on September 06, 2013, 07:46 am
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Clearnet: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-remain-secure-surveillance
Bruce Schneier is the Stephen Hawking of the crypto world. DON'T MISS THIS ARTICLE!!!!!
Here are his 5 tips near the end:
1) Hide in the network. Implement hidden services. Use Tor to anonymize yourself. Yes, the NSA targets Tor users, but it's work for them. The less obvious you are, the safer you are.
2) Encrypt your communications. Use TLS. Use IPsec. Again, while it's true that the NSA targets encrypted connections – and it may have explicit exploits against these protocols – you're much better protected than if you communicate in the clear.
3) Assume that while your computer can be compromised, it would take work and risk on the part of the NSA – so it probably isn't. If you have something really important, use an air gap. Since I started working with the Snowden documents, I bought a new computer that has never been connected to the internet. If I want to transfer a file, I encrypt the file on the secure computer and walk it over to my internet computer, using a USB stick. To decrypt something, I reverse the process. This might not be bulletproof, but it's pretty good.
4) Be suspicious of commercial encryption software, especially from large vendors. My guess is that most encryption products from large US companies have NSA-friendly back doors, and many foreign ones probably do as well. It's prudent to assume that foreign products also have foreign-installed backdoors. Closed-source software is easier for the NSA to backdoor than open-source software. Systems relying on master secrets are vulnerable to the NSA, through either legal or more clandestine means.
5) Try to use public-domain encryption that has to be compatible with other implementations. For example, it's harder for the NSA to backdoor TLS than BitLocker, because any vendor's TLS has to be compatible with every other vendor's TLS, while BitLocker only has to be compatible with itself, giving the NSA a lot more freedom to make changes. And because BitLocker is proprietary, it's far less likely those changes will be discovered. Prefer symmetric cryptography over public-key cryptography. Prefer conventional discrete-log-based systems over elliptic-curve systems; the latter have constants that the NSA influences when they can.
Since I started working with Snowden's documents, I have been using GPG, Silent Circle, Tails, OTR, TrueCrypt, BleachBit, and a few other things I'm not going to write about. There's an undocumented encryption feature in my Password Safe program from the command line); I've been using that as well.
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This is indeed very good information. Thanks, I'd +1 if I could.
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I think there's an important point that he missed, which Richard Stallman has been warning about for at least 5 years: get off the cloud.
And Eben Moglen has been advocating a solution for at least 3 years: host your data at home.
The home is the best legally protected place in the modern world, and hidden services make it easy for anyone to host their data even behind NAT. Furthermore, that decentralizes data storage, making it much more expensive to go after data (when you can't just ask a handful of compliant tech companies for a billion people's info).
Yes, it's slow, but that's a trade off worth making for the safety of your data. The main problem is the server-client model popularized by the major tech companies, which influences the asymmetric upload-download rate, and slow residential speeds in general. We need to challenge the telecoms and their AUPs to allow us to run internet services like web and email servers from home. Add together the legal and logistical benefits of hosting at home with encryption and onion routing and the NSA's job will become orders of magnitude more difficult.
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Exactly. That's why I always tell people here to keep their bitcoins under lock and key on their own computer at home using the Qt client and a strong passphrase.
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For anyone interested in the hosting-at-home idea, check out the FreedomBox mailing list archives. They were discussing innovative things to do with home hosting years ago. For example, you could use an open source, federated social networking platform like Diaspora to connect with your friends. They don't even have to be IRL friends, they could be anonymous people you meet on the internet, because your pods would be hidden services. You could offer each other distributed, encrypted, version controlled back ups. So I offer 10 GB of space to each of 10 friends, and they offer the same, and I get 100 GB of distributed backup space from them. If my box dies, I get a new one and download my back ups.
They even discussed backing up PGP private keys that way. In an anonymous community, your PGP key is your identity. So what happens when you lose it? They suggested breaking it into pieces and distributing them to your friends. Choose people who are in different social circles, so they don't all know each other and can't collude to reconstruct your private key (although it's symmetrically encrypted anyway with a strong password). Then if you lose your key, download the pieces from your friends and reconstruct it. In the best setup, they wouldn't know they are hosting a piece of your key, and only you would know the full set of people who have the pieces.
Plus, home hosting is the cheapest hosting you'll ever get that isn't advertising based. A nettop box or plug computer are sufficient to do everything described above. That costs at most $300 and might last 5 years, so you're essentially getting a low end dedicated server for $5 a month, less than the cost of most web hosting, and you can run all kinds of cool shit on it: social networks, game servers, email servers, other messaging clients, xmpp servers, Tor, Bitcoin clients, etc, etc.
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As common drug dealers, you don't have to worry about this much. Using a 4096 key will be satisfactory. However exchanging business secrets with associates or if you are the Scarface of the online drug game you might want to look into some way to exchange a symmetrical private key with each other, or just use OTR and drop in 4096 PGP messages to each other for very sensitive info such as addresses. At least the PGP will be padded inside OTR making it that much more difficult. We used to be able to claim the NSA has no interest in drug dealers but the DEA has been using them for intel and lying about it in court.
Do you have evidence for the DEA using drug dealers as Intel? And are any of those dealers from the SR?
Also, how much do you think it buys you to chain two VPNs a la http://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/chain-vpns-for-complete-anonymity-0131368/?
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http://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-u-directs-agents-cover-program-used-investigate-091643729.html
Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans (clearnet)
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Also, how much do you think it buys you to chain two VPNs a la http://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/chain-vpns-for-complete-anonymity-0131368/?
VPNs don't provide anonymity there's logs galore. Even if your VPN is in Russia, China or Iran doesn't mean there isn't low level law enforcement sharing between the countries, either through bribes or just convincing the host it'd be in their best interest to sell you out to them. I would only use an OpenVPN or IpSec VPN, and only for tunneling already encrypted traffic through it, so encrypted VoIP (ostel, redphone) or Tor/I2p connections. Just so you have extra padding to obfuscate whatever it is you're doing from your local ISP like accessing Tor, talking to people on encrypted phone ect. It prevents dragnet type surveillance from scooping up all traffic and holding it forever. Imagine using encrypted VoIP to plan massive drug exports for 5 years only to have LE discover a flaw in some crypto library and decrypt all your stored communications. If wrapped by additional encryption like a VPN then you get more protection but not anonymity.
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I think there's an important point that he missed, which Richard Stallman has been warning about for at least 5 years: get off the cloud.
We don understand how this seem like new information to some. First time we ever hear of "cloud" we and friends rolled eyes and said BAD IDEA. You give data control to 3rd party?! :o
Also like we think years ago that use Gmail was bad idea and all people we know off facebook now for years. Also common knowledge amongst techs that govt had hand in backdoor or weaken commercial product.
:-X
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I think there's an important point that he missed, which Richard Stallman has been warning about for at least 5 years: get off the cloud.
We don understand how this seem like new information to some. First time we ever hear of "cloud" we and friends rolled eyes and said BAD IDEA. You give data control to 3rd party?! :o
Also like we think years ago that use Gmail was bad idea and all people we know off facebook now for years. Also common knowledge amongst techs that govt had hand in backdoor or weaken commercial product.
:-X
Of course.
Giving up your property to someone else...if banks can steal the money you give them for safekeeping ,what do you think will happen "a bit" of data..steal and resell if not worse .
BTW facebook is nothing more then an attempt to give everyone on the net an idea like in the real world to not only keep tabs but to limit the freedom of individuals on the net.
-To be able to conquer it via corporatism.
The ultimate orgasm of google,facebook and that lot:)..
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5) Try to use public-domain encryption that has to be compatible with other implementations. For example, it's harder for the NSA to backdoor TLS than BitLocker, because any vendor's TLS has to be compatible with every other vendor's TLS, while BitLocker only has to be compatible with itself, giving the NSA a lot more freedom to make changes. And because BitLocker is proprietary, it's far less likely those changes will be discovered. Prefer symmetric cryptography over public-key cryptography. Prefer conventional discrete-log-based systems over elliptic-curve systems; the latter have constants that the NSA influences when they can.
This reminded me of how whonix (and I think tails does this to) suggest how to "trust" the pgp key they used to sign it:
http://zo7fksnun4b4v4jv.onion/wiki/Whonix_Signing_Key
Basically just put the key on a bunch of places, download it from each of those locations and if none of them are different then you know at the very least that is the key. Still doesn't provide authentication. All it does is prove what key is being used not who owns it. But you can do the same thing with encryption. Take something and do an aes encryption of it, then use some other program that also proclaims to just use aes and see if it's the same. I think the aes spec even has sample results that if you encrypt string a with key b you should get result c. The problem there is most of these encryption apps all use the same library (openssl) so if THAT has a back door in it then everything that depends on it would be vulnerable. I'd like to say that isn't possible, especially now I'm sure people are looking over that code like crazy now. And once this news gets out more I'm sure even more people will be looking at it.
TL;DR: his 5th comment I really aggree with. You need to encrypt with an open protocol and be able to decrypt that on another app that also uses that open protocol.
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Yes. Understand though there will most like not be back door in sense some think. Maybe the weaken key creation in certain very specific way that they have process for exploit easy. Must think deeper when go with they playbook.