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Laura Poitras on the Crypto Tools That Made Her Snowden Film Possible

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Re: Laura Poitras on the Crypto Tools That Made Her Snowden Film Possible

#11

Post by iwwr »

s_q_b wrote: post #2

Comforting to see my own privacy stack is almost exactly the same: Tails running specially configured Tor (five hop circuit, permanent guard nodes, and routes through countries unlikely to cooperate with one another), GPG for email, OTR for IM, Signal for mobile, and True Crypt + Apple disk encryption. Funny thing is, I don't even have any particular use for it other than kicking around vulnerability and security dis…

>five hop circuit, permanent guard nodes, and routes through countries unlikely to cooperate with one another

Won't that make your circuits more predictible as a consequence?

Re: Laura Poitras on the Crypto Tools That Made Her Snowden Film Possible

#12

Post by noinsight »

diminoten wrote: post #10
tedunangst wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did it? Seems like a claim that could use some elaboration. In what way would her privacy have been compromised by not using truecrypt? How do we know her privacy wasn't compromised despite using truecrypt?

The same way we know unicorns aren't real -- we have no evidence to think so.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Re: Laura Poitras on the Crypto Tools That Made Her Snowden Film Possible

#13

Post by domenzain »

iwwr wrote: post #11
s_q_b wrote: post #2

Comforting to see my own privacy stack is almost exactly the same: Tails running specially configured Tor (five hop circuit, permanent guard nodes, and routes through countries unlikely to cooperate with one another), GPG for email, OTR for IM, Signal for mobile, and True Crypt + Apple disk encryption. Funny thing is, I don't even have any particular use for it other than kicking around vulnerability and security dis…

>five hop circuit, permanent guard nodes, and routes through countries unlikely to cooperate with one another Won't that make your circuits more predictible as a consequence?

Assuming not all the machines are compromised, the longer the path, the less likely any agent is to follow it along in its entirety. Even if the whole path were compromised (but by different antagonistic parties) this would still hold.

Re: Laura Poitras on the Crypto Tools That Made Her Snowden Film Possible

#14

Post by tP5n »

acconrad wrote: post #8
s_q_b wrote: post #2

Comforting to see my own privacy stack is almost exactly the same: Tails running specially configured Tor (five hop circuit, permanent guard nodes, and routes through countries unlikely to cooperate with one another), GPG for email, OTR for IM, Signal for mobile, and True Crypt + Apple disk encryption. Funny thing is, I don't even have any particular use for it other than kicking around vulnerability and security dis…

How do you use these things in the wild? Privacy stacks generally require that they are installed on both ends of the message. Trying to get my friends and family to exchange encrypted texts or OTR IMs is basically impossible.

Encrypted text messages are relatively easy to implement as the apps (textsecure/redphone - signal) in question 'stack' nicely on top of whatever they were using for SMS already.

Encrypted mails are more problematic but aslong as they are using web mail, get them Mailvelope. On android with the K9 mailclient (+ openkeychain/apg) PGP-inline is possible to use, while it's not something your 'friends and family' will enjoy.

I have a personal disdain for pidgin/adium (libpurple), but similar to encrypted text messages: Once setup OTR is out of the way of your standard IM usage and it comes down to understanding user authentication.

Re: Laura Poitras on the Crypto Tools That Made Her Snowden Film Possible

#15

Post by patzerhacker »

noinsight wrote: post #12
diminoten wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way we know unicorns aren't real -- we have no evidence to think so.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Those making claims are required to produce the evidence for their claims.

Nobody is ever required to prove a negative. That's not how logic works.

Re: Laura Poitras on the Crypto Tools That Made Her Snowden Film Possible

#16

Post by s_q_b »

s_q_b wrote: post #4
hellbanner wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you run those nodes you hop through? Also.. congrats on finding people to communicate with securely-as-possible.

Thanks, it's mostly security nuts like me about security related topics. Hopping through my own Tor nodes could be a bit counter-productive, as it would make attribution of my circuit quite a bit easier. I use an extended hop relay with hand-selected nodes, which allows me to use five hops instead of the standard three, and hand-select fast relays that are in nations which are unlikely to share information readily. T…

@tor_user, your comment is dead, but since I have showdead on:

I go beyond the .torrc config settings. I have a custom Python controller that uses Stem[0] to interface with the tor binary's control port to build my paths and circuits.

My tor binary has some customizations as well (stop sending 512 byte cells by default, random packet delays with large transfers, creative TLS and circuit multiplexing), and of course there's the standard use of obfsproxy[1], unlisted bridges[2], etc.

[0]https://stem.torproject.org/

[1]https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy.html.en

[2]https://bridges.torproject.org/

Re: Laura Poitras on the Crypto Tools That Made Her Snowden Film Possible

#17

Post by s_q_b »

iwwr wrote: post #11
s_q_b wrote: post #2

Comforting to see my own privacy stack is almost exactly the same: Tails running specially configured Tor (five hop circuit, permanent guard nodes, and routes through countries unlikely to cooperate with one another), GPG for email, OTR for IM, Signal for mobile, and True Crypt + Apple disk encryption. Funny thing is, I don't even have any particular use for it other than kicking around vulnerability and security dis…

>five hop circuit, permanent guard nodes, and routes through countries unlikely to cooperate with one another Won't that make your circuits more predictible as a consequence?

To add to what was said, the only one of those measures that's potentially dangerous is the single guard node with manual rotation.

It's not adequately studied, and I'm operating based upon my own research and intuition there, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.

Re: Laura Poitras on the Crypto Tools That Made Her Snowden Film Possible

#18

Post by s_q_b »

tP5n wrote: post #14
acconrad wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you use these things in the wild? Privacy stacks generally require that they are installed on both ends of the message. Trying to get my friends and family to exchange encrypted texts or OTR IMs is basically impossible.

Encrypted text messages are relatively easy to implement as the apps (textsecure/redphone - signal) in question 'stack' nicely on top of whatever they were using for SMS already. Encrypted mails are more problematic but aslong as they are using web mail, get them Mailvelope. On android with the K9 mailclient (+ openkeychain/apg) PGP-inline is possible to use, while it's not something your 'friends and family' will en…

Tor's transparent and only my problem, Signal is easy to set up for laymen, GPGTools isn't hard to walk through (I know attorneys that use it just fine), OTR has plugins for everything that supports XMPP...

Re: Laura Poitras on the Crypto Tools That Made Her Snowden Film Possible

#20

Post by tptacek »

noinsight wrote: post #12
diminoten wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way we know unicorns aren't real -- we have no evidence to think so.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Greenwald and Snowden also used Cryptocat in Q1 2013. Now, there's no evidence to think that NSA decrypted all those messages... but in Q1 2013, Cryptocat was breakable; by NSA in June, and by anyone with a laptop from May all the way back to October 2011. These attacks are passive. If you've been hoovering up all the raw Internet traffic, you can go back through your archives and decrypt all the Cryptocat traffic from those time periods.

So my point being, when your adversaries are nations, there usually isn't going to be "evidence" that your comms were decrypted, at least not until you're indicted. You're right: that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

I don't think anything interesting happened with Truecrypt, though.

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