Clarification: What this is all about
ParanoidLinux is about privacy. Your privacy. There are those who would take this basic right away from you without thinking twice.
Our goals are security focused, but not quite with the same meaning as "a computer secure from network attack." Our brand of security is privacy focused.
We want to make it simple to communicate privately with trusted friends with a very high level of assurance that messages cannot be intercepted by a third party. Making secure communications simple and enabled by default is a primary goal of the project.
In addition to secure communications, another privacy related concern is personal data. Utilities such as `shred` that can securely delete data. Encrypted partitions are part of our plans and may even be the default for all partitions other than /boot.
When someone boots ParanoidLinux they can be pretty darned sure that their activities will be very difficult or impossible to monitor.
Comments
focus
Isn't the focus of this distro to help in repressive governments that make the U.S. Government look like a walk in the park?
Mike
Yep.
That too.
"The only thing that hasn't changed since 9/11 is that the government is still *u**ing up"
-Steal This Book Today
funny
hi what i find funny is that some ppl r so obsessed with the book Little Brother that they actually copied a program and made it real! but i like it.
Anonym.OS ...is paranoid
Fletch, can I assume that you are familiar with the Anonym.OS project?
spying
Really I am not as worried about internet spying as someone cracking my password and getting on my pc. I want my machine private in a face to face encounter as well as an internet encounter.
Big Brother IS Watching!
Trust me, Boy Genius, "cracking your password" is NOT the way a gov't forensics tech will gain access to the contents of any machine you use. Keyboard sniffers, subtle trojans, and disk cloning devices (and perhaps Van Eyck monitoring) are going to guarantee that you will not even know you've had an encounter, let alone experience it "face to face."
"Little Brother" was not about securing individual machines, except incidentally; it was about the much less visible, but culturally much more dangerous, threats of government surveillance, data mining, and loss of liberty, in the name of "security", to imagined threats. In the story, the primary use of Paranoid Linux was to protect communications and to obscure the location(s) of the persons communicating. Remember, M. didn't just hide his data locally, he moved it to offshore, anonymous servers to protect it.
There are well-known, easily-implemented mechanisms for protecting data on an individual system against everything except rubber-hose cryptography. What is much harder to do is to hide your actions from statistical analysis in an environment over which you have little or no control. This is the problem that Paranoid Linux is trying to address and it is, to quote Knuth, "deep."
Sp00ky
"No matter how paranoid you are, it isn't paranoid enough." -- X-files
We have met the enemy and he is us...
There is an interesting article on c|net about the loss of privacy as Internet use grows: "The Internet -- a private eye's best friend" <http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-9995207-83.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5> .
Highlights include:
"Anything you put on the Internet will be grabbed, indexed, cataloged and out of your control before you know it," [Steven Rambam] told CNET News after the [Last HOPE] session. "The genie is out of the bottle. Data doesn't stay in one location. It migrates to hundreds of places."
"Domino's has built the biggest consumer database in America," and the U.S. Marshall's Service, the New York Police Department and collection agencies are using it to track people down, Rambam said."
There also are vast stores of data based on peoples' Web and computer activities being amassed by technology companies that can be easily used to connect a specific individual to specific activities and information. For example, end user license agreements allow for location data to be sent back to the manufacturer every time a customer logs in and photos and burned CDs and DVDs have unique serial numbers for tracking, he said. [I wonder it that last applies to Linux-based tools, or just to corporate (MS-DOS & Mac) tools? -- Sp00ky]
Finally, cameras and video cameras have helped revolutionize the snooping industry. Smart cameras with facial and activity recognition analytic capabilities are popping up everywhere, while the FBI and others are testing systems that will recognize the walking gait of individuals, Rambam said.
In a test of his skills, Rambam tracked down someone who had agreed to go in hiding for one year. He was able to locate the person nine times, using methods including social engineering and a dummy e-mail account, tracking the IP address of an Internet café computer, cell phone triangulation, a credit card trace on an airline ticket using a frequent flyer number, a fake Match.com ad and an online "wanted" poster.
And the piece de resistance:
Although he works closely with law enforcement agencies, Rambam has had a legal run-in of his own, just like some of the hackers in the audience. He had been scheduled to speak at the previous HOPE, in 2006, but was arrested right before he was to give his talk and spent two days in jail on charges of impersonating an FBI agent and tampering with a government witness. The charges were dropped and his accuser now faces arrest, he said.
So, it's ALL real and it's happening NOW!
I would say "To the barracades!", but it's not the same when you climb a firewall and throw virtual cobblestones.
Sp00ky
"No matter how paranoid you are, it isn't paranoid enough." -- X-files
:O
DAMN YOU DOMINOS YOU TWO FACED CRAP PIZZA MAKING BASTARDS! DIE!DIE!DIE!
"The only thing that hasn't changed since 9/11 is that the government is still *u**ing up"
-Steal This Book Today
How can you ensure privacy on an open-source system?
It occurs to me that because Linux is open source, it can easily be corrupted by those who want to invade your privacy. What assurances can you have that *this* copy of paranoidlinux is the real one, the version that hasn't been diddled with?
As I was reading the list of desired software, I realized that it would be simple to amend any of those programs to behave differently, to make them ineffective. Put in back doors in encryption, make "shred" not so effective, make tor phone home among other things, who knows? How do you defend against that?
Yes, you can use MD5 checksums and all that good stuff, but not everyone is going to understand or use them. Those aren't immune to changes, either. And if paranoidlinux gets spread around, some servers will be offering a weakened or even a wholly malicious version.
I think this bears looking into.
--
Just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
'shred' is a placebo
Fletch,
I hate to burst your balloon, but 'shred' does not "securely delete data." The best that can be said is that it obfuscates data from exposure through first-order attacks by script-kiddies. Contemporary forensic tools (real-life FBI, not NSA (black tools) or CSI:Cyberspace (fantasy tools)) can easily reveal data left behind in slack space, temp files, and the swap space/partition. <soapbox> The solution is NOT to apply fallible tools, but to ensure that data to be protected NEVER reaches persistent storage in plaintext form. </soapbox>
--
Sp00ky
"No matter how paranoid you are, it isn't paranoid enough." -- X-files
Thermite is wonderful
Another way to guard your data, though this should never be used by itself, would be to implement a sort of dead man's switch connected to an igniter for a thermite pile above the hard drive. If the true user doesn't perform some action once every 48 hours, the igniter lights the thermite, and it melts your hard drive. No recovery possible.
Of course the case would have to be insulated with concrete to prevent the thermite from continuing on through your floor, but it's the ultimate in data protection.
~~~~~
Take it back.
Indeed it is
Thermite!?! I LOVE thermite!!
"The only thing that hasn't changed since 9/11 is that the government is still *u**ing up"
-Steal This Book Today
SElinux? I don't think so..
Well, ideea of paranoid is good, but using SELinux framework seems completelly stupid, sorry.
SELinux is a project developed directly by NSA, and "No Such Agency" is an untrusted entity, 'cause...you know why...
In an gpl world you have alternative, rsbac for example..
anyway, i have nothing with nsa, but use of SELinus doesn't fit me.
just my 2 cents..
"The Force is strong with this Tux.”
May the Source be with You!
This is the *nix-land.
In quiet nights,
you can hear the windows machines rebooting.
SElinux is the wrong tool
NSA did not develop SElinux, it sponsored it. I have worked for/with several firms that have, in their turn, worked on NSA projects (including SElinux), so I do have some direct experience to back up that claim (although, in keeping with the probable ParanoidLinux philosophy, I won't reveal much else ;) ). While one should NOT trust NSA or the U.S. Govt when it comes to privacy issues (Warrants? We don't need no stinking wiretap warrants!), the SElinux source is available through Ubuntu repositories for public review and compilation.
The real reason to not use SElinux is that it is the wrong tool for the job. SElinux is intended to be a "secure" Linux for a U.S. DoD environment. The threat model is concerned with external, network-based attacks and protecting/separating data in a benign, multi-level secure environment. The treat model is not concerned with obfuscating network communications or protecting information on persistent media from observation if physical security of the hardware platform is compromised.
A possible threat model for ParanoidLinux would be more concerned with masking network activity, both actively and in historical data-at-rest (e.g., cookies) and with rendering persistent storage unintelligible when at rest or in duress situations.
Before we start selecting base OS distros or packages or specifying functional components, we need to determine what the threat model is and what we need to do to address it.
--
Sp00ky
"No matter how paranoid you are, it isn't paranoid enough." -- X-files
marvelous.
was forwarded here by a likeminded fellow. just wish that i could convert the coworkers to dump the it dept. course all my troubles with them loading my machine with bloatware could be that my passwords and logons are insults to them... ;)
I will be anxiously waiting.