Silk Road forums
Discussion => Newbie discussion => Topic started by: Cafegirl on February 16, 2013, 08:54 am
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Slowly getting an understanding of SR, when I start to buy/sell I obviously want to get as close to 'best practice' as possible.......so I'm thinking of using Linux.
Any advice?
Can i achieve better security/anonymity with Linux over windows or is there nothing in it?
Which platform if I choose to use it?
Thanks in advance!!!!
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This doesn't fully answer your question, but I give a try on it anyways:
Why would you use Linux for anonymity?
- You can solely rely on software that is fully open source, which means a community of developers has checked it all - however, you will of course download a distribution/"flavour" (Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE) with fully compiled code, so you will have to trust them, too
- The way the access rights for files are placed is old, simple and rock solid, and has been proven useful and sufficient for 3 decades - in Windows, people have been working as admin even during their productive jobs, due to laziness. This way, viruses/troians had a few more entry points through the users' "mis clicks". Only since Vista/W7 this has changed, and users are made to use a non-admin account for their daily routine. Also Windows NTFS access rights are so complicated, it's confusing even for accomplished large-company sysadmins (yes i saw an actual case)
- If using Apple/Microsoft, you have really no possibility to check if there isn't a backdoor built in by them, which MIGHT be used by gov spies on request. Hackers will probably scrutinously try to detect such backdoors but how can we be sure they all are found ?
Cons:
- If you have been used to one OS, you will need to learn handling again, but still the amount to learn is not more for the average user than is to switch from, say, Windows XP to Windows 7
- There's a lot of concurring tools (editors/file managers/etc.) which are essentially designed to do the same, and you have to pick the best for yourself, which can be confusing, after there had been only one tool for each task
- Many software vendors (esp. games) don't bother to issue their piece for Linux because the market is smaller, which is the reason why even heavy linux users have a secondary Windows OS, just in case
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There are a few instructions on these forums to install an extra system solely used for your anonymous communication but so far I haven't been bothering to do so, and my main OS is a linux already :)
If I was to do it the royal way, I would probably set up an encrypted virtual machine running some fast and lean Linux system for this purpose.
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Linux is almost universally considered to be significantly more secure than any version of Windows. I mean there are dozens if not hundreds of examples of why this is so. Some believe OpenBSD is more or less the "most" secure commonly available OS, but I've never tried it and it always seemed like overkill to me... too few people use it -- compatibility problems all over the place, even though it's very similar to Linux. Anyway, it's an option. I consider it a pointless one, but your mileage may vary & all that.
If you want to make sure nobody can ever find evidence of your Silk Road activity, you need to encrypt your entire hard drive with TrueCrypt -- not just have a hidden encrypted volume -- and never plug your USB key in to your Windows machine. That's what Astor has said, at least. Frankly I've never played with TrueCrypt: I don't vend and there's no reason for anybody to bother with real disk forensics on any machine of mine, so I don't really find it all that interesting...
It does require some... configuration, so to speak. I mean if you've never used Linux, you're going to want to try using it a bit before you jump in to full disk encryption, etc..
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To be brief, Linux certainly has the potential to be more secure than Windows, but the most important thing is that you understand your operating system. It doesn't help to have Linux if you don't know what you're doing. There is quite a learning curve involved, but if you're up for it, you might try a dual-boot for a while until you know what you're doing, and then ditch Windows or run it in VMWare.
I've been using unix-based operating systems for over a decade now. I've mostly used Debian Linux and FreeBSD. I can hardly stand Windows now. Just don't think that it's something you can learn in a few days or weeks. It'll take at least a few months to understand the basics of it if you're dedicated.