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SecureDrop

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31–40 of 99 posts

Re: SecureDrop

#31

Post by glomph »

FiloSottile wrote: post #26

If the leaker visits this page before opening the Tor Browser from a regular browser to copy the onion url, the whole thing is as safe as SSL as there will be a trail of the SSL connection just before the visit to SecureDrop. And they don't even explain to avoid it. OPSEC is hard.

Only if they visit the page just before. Seems plausible they would read about it, set it up and then drop their documents at a later date as a default behavior.

I agree it would probably be a good idea to put a warning about such a problem though.

Re: SecureDrop

#32

Post by giarc »

FiloSottile wrote: post #26

If the leaker visits this page before opening the Tor Browser from a regular browser to copy the onion url, the whole thing is as safe as SSL as there will be a trail of the SSL connection just before the visit to SecureDrop. And they don't even explain to avoid it. OPSEC is hard.

That's like saying John Smith went to a bank withdrew money at 1pm on Jan 1. Then the bank was robbed at 1:10 Jan 1 therefore John Smith robbed the bank.

I don't think you can connect visiting the info page and the very next SecureDrop file upload.

Re: SecureDrop

#33

Post by FiloSottile »

giarc wrote: post #32
FiloSottile wrote: post #26

If the leaker visits this page before opening the Tor Browser from a regular browser to copy the onion url, the whole thing is as safe as SSL as there will be a trail of the SSL connection just before the visit to SecureDrop. And they don't even explain to avoid it. OPSEC is hard.

That's like saying John Smith went to a bank withdrew money at 1pm on Jan 1. Then the bank was robbed at 1:10 Jan 1 therefore John Smith robbed the bank. I don't think you can connect visiting the info page and the very next SecureDrop file upload.

It all depends on traffic.

And "a group of 100 IPs including a coffee shop near NSA employee John Smith's home" is enough.

Re: SecureDrop

#34

Post by icebraining »

cik wrote: post #29
FiloSottile wrote: post #26

If the leaker visits this page before opening the Tor Browser from a regular browser to copy the onion url, the whole thing is as safe as SSL as there will be a trail of the SSL connection just before the visit to SecureDrop. And they don't even explain to avoid it. OPSEC is hard.

There's this hard tradeoff that most people are willing to make, between making things more 'secure' and making things useable by the general public. I just wish that attention would be paid to the security side of things. Ultimately, we can write descriptive documentation - but getting it read and understood is hard. Cryptoparties, are again a great idea, but getting the non-technical user involved is damned hard. I…

I don't think SecureDrop is designed to be usable by the general public.

Re: SecureDrop

#35

Post by lawl »

FiloSottile wrote: post #26

If the leaker visits this page before opening the Tor Browser from a regular browser to copy the onion url, the whole thing is as safe as SSL as there will be a trail of the SSL connection just before the visit to SecureDrop. And they don't even explain to avoid it. OPSEC is hard.

Embed the page as iframe and scrub the referrer on every page a viewer visits.

That should make it hard enough to correlate any data, I guess they have enough visitors.

Re: SecureDrop

#36

Post by aqme28 »

giarc wrote: post #32
FiloSottile wrote: post #26

If the leaker visits this page before opening the Tor Browser from a regular browser to copy the onion url, the whole thing is as safe as SSL as there will be a trail of the SSL connection just before the visit to SecureDrop. And they don't even explain to avoid it. OPSEC is hard.

That's like saying John Smith went to a bank withdrew money at 1pm on Jan 1. Then the bank was robbed at 1:10 Jan 1 therefore John Smith robbed the bank. I don't think you can connect visiting the info page and the very next SecureDrop file upload.

It's not about proving that John Smith robbed the bank, but raising suspicion so that he will be investigated.

Re: SecureDrop

#37

Post by cik »

icebraining wrote: post #34
cik wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's this hard tradeoff that most people are willing to make, between making things more 'secure' and making things useable by the general public. I just wish that attention would be paid to the security side of things. Ultimately, we can write descriptive documentation - but getting it read and understood is hard. Cryptoparties, are again a great idea, but getting the non-technical user involved is damned hard. I…

I don't think SecureDrop is designed to be usable by the general public.

I'm happy to agree with you. Equally I feel that with a (small) amount of love, it could be used by whistleblowers! To me it's almost ready for that.

Re: SecureDrop

#38

Post by FiloSottile »

lawl wrote: post #35
FiloSottile wrote: post #26

If the leaker visits this page before opening the Tor Browser from a regular browser to copy the onion url, the whole thing is as safe as SSL as there will be a trail of the SSL connection just before the visit to SecureDrop. And they don't even explain to avoid it. OPSEC is hard.

Embed the page as iframe and scrub the referrer on every page a viewer visits. That should make it hard enough to correlate any data, I guess they have enough visitors.

I don't see how that would help. The threat model here, the reason to use Tor is that they could be compromised and forced to log, and through Tor they would not know the leaker's IP.

You only need the two "leak at time X, IP Y loaded this page at time X-5" datapoints to break this.

An embedded page is not fetched by someone else.

Re: SecureDrop

#39

Post by dheera »

FiloSottile wrote: post #26

If the leaker visits this page before opening the Tor Browser from a regular browser to copy the onion url, the whole thing is as safe as SSL as there will be a trail of the SSL connection just before the visit to SecureDrop. And they don't even explain to avoid it. OPSEC is hard.

Or if the submitter accidentally leaves their cell phone on en route to or while at said public location ...

Re: SecureDrop

#40

Post by MikeTaylor »

hadoukenio wrote: post #2

Sometime in the near future, I predict that the US will require some form of photo I.D before using an internet kiosk. As usual, the spin will be to protect the children.

Good thing criminals have no way to obtain a fake photo-ID.
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