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Inside the Operating System Edward Snowden Used to Evade the NSA

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Re: Inside the Operating System Edward Snowden Used to Evade the NSA

#41

Post by sp332 »

infinity0 wrote: post #25
epo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The audit occurred because testing revealed the presence of a problem. Shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted is no vindication of open source.

How would you have found the bug without it being open source? You think companies pay for these open public audits on proprietary software ?

The vulnerability was first found by a fuzzer, which would have worked equally well on closed-source software. And I believe the fuzz tester (part of Codenomicon's "Defensics") is also closed-source.

Re: Inside the Operating System Edward Snowden Used to Evade the NSA

#42

Post by pavanky »

sp332 wrote: post #40
im3w1l wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite know how this works, so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but couldn't someone just take the difference between your inbound and outbound tor traffic to find how much traffic originates from your computer?

They might know how much, but they wouldn't know which traffic was yours.

The same is still true even if you do not run a tor node.

Re: Inside the Operating System Edward Snowden Used to Evade the NSA

#43

Post by dmix »

One important and often overlooked feature of Tails is when you shut it down it wipes your system memory/RAM using sdmem.

Your encrypted data and sensitive files are often accessible via memory forensics even if you shut your computer down. Including the websites you visited. Your encryption keys can be in your computers memory for weeks and is easily accessible via a memory dump.

This is why people say that with physical access your computer can always be owned. Even if it's encrypted. Tails is the only one I know that handles this attack vector by default.

https://tails.boum.org/contribute/design/memory_erasure/

Re: Inside the Operating System Edward Snowden Used to Evade the NSA

#44

Post by dmix »

agumonkey wrote: post #18
perlpimp wrote: post #15

You can hack SD cards actually unlike the article states, Bunny's blog post and presentation at Chaos Computer Congress mentions of this possibility. SD cards have microcontrollers and with enough resources their guess flash media can be subverted. Diversity of these controllers and variety of "proprietary" standards the way these flash controllers work however can be the entropy that makes SD controller hacking very…

also, in your hdd controller(s) http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack . same stuff, too many cpu everywhere, making protocols meaningless.

And Macbooks can be hacked through the battery https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2796264

Re: Inside the Operating System Edward Snowden Used to Evade the NSA

#45

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

epo wrote: post #22
aw3c2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it did. The heartbleed bug was found during an audit of the open source of openssl.

The audit occurred because testing revealed the presence of a problem. Shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted is no vindication of open source.

This point is important. Testing came first and then auditing. In other words, black box testing and then white box testing. Why pretend you are better off just because you have millions of lines of inscrutable source?

Re: Inside the Operating System Edward Snowden Used to Evade the NSA

#46

Post by drzaiusapelord »

jebus989 wrote: post #23

Impressive how much thought and work has gone into Tails development, e.g. it has a surprisingly-convincing XP skin that hides the fact you're even using Linux to the casual observer. Kudos to the devs.

Except now seeing an XP desktop in a corporate environment will raise eyebrows as its officially dead.

No Win7 skin?

Re: Inside the Operating System Edward Snowden Used to Evade the NSA

#47

Post by drzaiusapelord »

cloudwalking wrote: post #2

Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amnesic_Incognito_Live_Syst... , a Debian fork which forces Tor for all outgoing and incoming connections. Designed to be run from read-only media.

So, is this proof that tor is not completely subverted by the NSA? Recent articles here claim that the NSA has been deploying numerous nodes and can analyze traffic from multiple nodes to compromise the user.

Or is this proof of tor being better than nothing?

Re: Inside the Operating System Edward Snowden Used to Evade the NSA

#48

Post by Karunamon »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #46
jebus989 wrote: post #23

Impressive how much thought and work has gone into Tails development, e.g. it has a surprisingly-convincing XP skin that hides the fact you're even using Linux to the casual observer. Kudos to the devs.

Except now seeing an XP desktop in a corporate environment will raise eyebrows as its officially dead. No Win7 skin?

A more cynical person would say you've not worked in many corporate environments ;)

Re: Inside the Operating System Edward Snowden Used to Evade the NSA

#49

Post by toyg »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #47
cloudwalking wrote: post #2

Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amnesic_Incognito_Live_Syst... , a Debian fork which forces Tor for all outgoing and incoming connections. Designed to be run from read-only media.

So, is this proof that tor is not completely subverted by the NSA? Recent articles here claim that the NSA has been deploying numerous nodes and can analyze traffic from multiple nodes to compromise the user. Or is this proof of tor being better than nothing?

The latter. The NSA didn't have to analyze anything: Snowden was not a known target, and he revealed himself before any real manhunt or mass-analysis had started.

Re: Inside the Operating System Edward Snowden Used to Evade the NSA

#50

Post by AJ007 »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #6
jonemo wrote: post #4

Another Debian based boot-from-CD OS that used to be quite popular is Knoppix [1]. I remember that was a big thing in the times of Win98 viruses when people used it for system recovery. In Germany they distributed it as add-on to computer magazines. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knoppix

Knoppix was my first introduction to Linux. The boot-from-CD aspect amazed me. At first the only thing I used it for was recovering data from a screwed up Windows install but eventually I got more into it and started installing other distress (starting with Ubuntu I think).

For some perspective, this was back in the days where it was actually quite a bit of work to get get linux configured and running correctly on your at home desktop. Knoppix was quite a miracle.
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