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Tor Appliance

schneier.com

94 pointsdllthomas24 comments

Please, use something open source and truly secure: PORTAL on a Raspberry Pi. Developed by @thegrugq, reviewed and trusted by many. For a really lighter pricetag (the price of a RPi).

https://github.com/grugq/PORTALofPi

P.O.R.T.A.L. Personal Onion Router To Assure Liberty https://github.com/grugq/portal

A Linux router that connects to Tor over one interface and shares the connection over another one. Simple and secure.

PORTAL author comments on OP: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/tor_appliance...

> This is a commercial variant of the FOSS PORTAL project that I released in September 2012 at Ekoparty. You don't need to run a closed source commercial device to get easy Tor anonymity, just use PORTAL on the RaspberryPi.

This is a terribly marketed idea. Totally anonymous? Sure, just don't log into anything you've logged into before. Or use Flash. Or forget to dump your cookies before you start. Perfectly secure? Sure, if you use TLS. But then it's really TLS protecting you, not tor, isn't it? There are plenty of naughty exit nodes out there and I'd never log into an account I cared about via Tor without TLS.

I like Tor and think that making it easier is a great idea, but when you sell it as an easy path to security and anonymity, you are going to get some people hurt. Tor can be both anonymous and secure if you take certain paranoid precautions when you use it, but are general consumers going to have any idea about those precautions? It's a challenge to get people to not just bypass browser cert errors or to secure their Wi-Fi, advanced tor browsing precautions may as well be instructions for using a zero G space toilet.

> Tor can be both anonymous and secure if you take certain paranoid precautions when you use it

Downloading the Tor Browser Bundle is "taking paranoid precautions"? It already has HTTPSEverywhere built in, disables JavaScript by default, etc.

FYI: Tor Browser, in its current iteration, does not disable Javascript by default, and the NoScript is configured to allow Javascript by default.

There's also a large concern that using NoScript in any form harms anonymity, as your NoScript whitelist/blacklist is somewhat detectable by websites and can act as a fingerprint.

Tor browser (package tor-browser-2.3.25-15_en-US, latest bundle) does have Javascript disabled by default. Please check options-content->enable Javascript. If I am mistaken I am delighted to hear otherwise.

I agree that overselling the security of any product is bad - it should generally be considered defective to begin with. I can't even find enough information about Safeplug to begin analyzing their security as they don't provide any link to the source code, build process or any documentation. There's no way I could recommend this to anybody.

Also, on TLS, you will not be perfectly secure, and I think it's dangerous to consider yourself secure against a state-sponsored actor by using it. TLS has quite a large surface area for attack in its current form - The PKI. If you're going to take paranoid precautions, it's probably best to assume one or more CAs are rogue/compromised already (or that they could become so at any time).

Using the same browser for regular browsing and TOR browsing is a horrible idea. As it turns out, browser controls for stored state are not intuitive. For example, Google says it's okay that tracking-ids leak from regular browsing mode in to Incognito mode - just not the other way around. Huh? https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=311296 (same thing with Mozilla)

I'd really like to see a Tor browser distribution that spins up a clean VM each time you open a new session. Until then, the guys building the Tor Browser Bundle are doing a pretty decent job.

The "OPSEC for Hackers" guy, @grugq, is also developing a Tor appliance. PORTAL is opensource (unlike the SafePlug) and targets the Raspberry Pi.

https://github.com/grugq/PORTALofPi

Stick this technology on your network then sit back and watch your bank lock your account when they notice you login from three different countries in the space of half an hour.

You can't use Tor without understanding the basics of how it works and what the risks are. If normal consumers are going to stick these things on their network, they're gonna have a bad time.

Worse yet, they're going to add noise to the signals for normal behavior, and standards of predictability will be lowered on both sides, ruining things for the people who do understand the technology.

Well the banks might have to change their tune when >50% of their clients are using Tor. In fact, when security and anonymity are commonplace, most websites will have to reexamine their policies.

Direct link to the Safeplug - https://pogoplug.com/safeplug

I'm definitely curious, but oh wow, do I have doubts. So many doubts.

Is there a more technical analysis of this, and how it works, and what it restricts? Because nearly all the benefit of this can be lost pretty easily, unless they make what I assume would be rather painful decisions for users (strip all cookies, etc, which obviously they don't do).

If this is just about avoiding geo-IP lookup, then I think it's a hard sell. People who would care might be offended that it does little else, and people who don't have no reason to spend $50.

It also drops your throughput to about 7 kb/s and occasionally gives you German Google.

Tor has a lot of trade-offs for little benefit, and the tool is designed for being used for specific purposes rather then as an everyday browsing tool.

Just don't try to buy healthcare through it.

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.network.tor.user/28558

How are users protected from malicious exit nodes, assuming they're visiting sites unprotected by SSL?

I find it an excellent idea, and the ad-blocking is the cherry on top:

  Can I use ad-blocking software with Safeplug?
  
  Safeplug has ad-blocking software built-in out of the box.

My only worry is that people may keep it off most of the time, because of slowness, and eventually forget about it.

One issue with ad-blocking, or in fact any other addon which may be user-configured, is that they may produce browsers which have a unique fingerprint, which will undermine any anonymity offered by Tor. It's important that all installations of an anonymity software offer the same, or a restricted number of fingerprints, and they restrict the ability of the user to modify it by mistake.

Also, eliminating the surface area for fingerprinting a browser is useful - so for example, removing flash (which can fingerprint you based on installed fonts), having NoScript enabled, and having a default web-bug blocking setup (such as disconnect.me), and self-destructing cookies should be a must.

I hope lots of people buy devices like this. The bigger the Tor network the better!

There has been a thread about this on the Tor mailing list:

https://www.mail-archive.com/tor-talk@lists.torproject.org/m...

There are quite a few people on there advocating using technology like this to route other peoples traffic through Tor without their knowledge, including Jacob Appelbaum. I argue against this.

reminds me of janusvm

But but but... CP! In 3, 2, 1...

Thank you. We must always think of the children!

One example would be how we are giving them a world where they will have no privacy at all.

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