91–100 of 164 posts
Stingrays were being used as early as the 1990s by federal law enforcement. They were used to help locate Kevin Mitnick in North Carolina. Edit - I recall reading that years ago in Tsutomu Shimomura's book 'Takedown' (published in 1996). Outside of this, I have no other reference. It's a good read BTW. https://www.amazon.com/Takedown-Pursuit-Capture-Americas-Com...
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Lest anyone believe their positional privacy is at risk, even the Verizon routing prefix could have homed the cops onto which provider to drill down into. The take-away here, is that end-to-end protocols by neccessity as currently written send the src IP in the packet. If we'd designed IP to send the src IP as a payload, and had encrypted payload (TLS style) and then only had the destination IP in the outer packet, t…
If the source IP is encrypted, the recipient needs to decrypt it first in order to be able to send a response. To decrypt it, it needs to either have some shared secret with the sender, or the sender needs to use the recipient's private key. The parties cannot obtain the shared secret the usual way, the Diffie-Helman exchange. It cannot be performed, because it requires back-and-forth communication, which we are tryi…
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* Secure handshaking requires interactivity, unless you share secrets with your actual partner (no, your CA trust store isn't enough) in advance. So your first packet would leak it. * To return ICMP error messages ("destination unreachable"), otherwise you'd have long timeouts. * Ratelimiting outside the server (e.g. DDOS protection). Many ISPs do actually filter source IPs. (Of course you can't on the backbone, any…
+RPF requires it to help prevent spoofing (BCP 38)
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Computers, ever heard of them ?
Haha never :) For someone so paranoid about privacy as to not even own a "dumb" phone, I was curious what type of computer/internet setup they would be using to work around all the privacy traps such as broswer fingerprinting, traffic analysis, deep OS and hardware exploits, linguistic analysis, etc. etc.
While it wouldn't erase every hint of your presence, it takes a correlation of data to track someone; disparate trackable info is insufficient.
[1] https://puri.sm/posts/purism-librem-laptops-completely-disab...
Is there a physical device that can provide VPN-only wifi connection, so that a laptop or wifi-only ipad (say) which were to connect to it would not risk ever exposing its IP?
You can configure your router to route all traffic through a VPN. It's a standard setting in all routers.
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Yes, this was the key fail. If he'd been careful enough not to leak his IP address, he would arguably have remained free. I was, for example, using VPN services and Tor well before 2008. And I've never been more than a gray-hat hobbyist sort of "hacker". Anyone seriously into criminal activity who didn't reliably hide their IP address was a fool, even then. My point isn't to dump on Rigmaiden. It's just that articles…
IMHO, it's less about privacy being impossible, and more about privacy being difficult and expensive.
This is a really old story. The article is new, but I don't see any new data. It should be labelled (2013). hn.algolia.com/?query=rigmaiden
"Several months later, in April 2015, the New York Civil Liberties Union (the New York State chapter of the ACLU) managed to do what no one else could: successfully sue to obtain an unredacted copy of the NDA that the FBI had law enforcement agencies sign when they acquired stingrays"
Stingrays were being used as early as the 1990s by federal law enforcement. They were used to help locate Kevin Mitnick in North Carolina. Edit - I recall reading that years ago in Tsutomu Shimomura's book 'Takedown' (published in 1996). Outside of this, I have no other reference. It's a good read BTW. https://www.amazon.com/Takedown-Pursuit-Capture-Americas-Com...
"...Shimomura was sitting in the passenger seat of a Raleigh Sprint technician's car, holding a cellular-frequency direction-finding antenna, and watching a 'signal-strength meter display its reading on a laptop computer screen.'"
This sounds, perhaps, functionally equivalent to a modern stingray, but I suspect it was not operating as a cell-site simulator. The hardware/software required at the time to "man in the middle" Mitnick's cellular calls would not have fit comfortably with Shimomura in the passenger seat of a car and would not have run smoothly on a mid-90's era laptop. Also, the bandwidth required to forward the connections would have only been achievable over directional microwave or landline which seems unsuitable for use in a moving vehicle. However, this was the dawn of digital cellular networks. The calls would not have been encrypted in any way at the time so tracking the source of specific emissions using triangulation would have been fairly trivial, especially with the assistance of a Sprint technician with access to the CDMA code Mitnick's handset was using at any given time.
Actually, I just checked and it seems Sprint didn't launch its PCS network until later that year[0] so it's possible the network in question was analog(?), making simply "listening in" even easier, without having to simulate anything.
[0]http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1995-11-16/business/1995320...
I value the privacy so I don't own or use cellphone.
> I value the privacy so I don't own or use cellphone. This is a little extreme, but I've started turning off my phone or putting it in airplane mode when not expecting a call. In addition to not being as distracted, I've had a marked decrease in spam calls - I think they tend to mark phones that repeatedly send them straight to VM as "cold".