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Comment by s_q_b | Hacker News Reader

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 discussions with friends and colleagues that I highly doubt anyone is even trying to intercept. But it is very comforting to know that it's the same set of tools relied upon by those with something highly significant at stake.

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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.

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...

>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.

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.

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. There's a few more tricks I use to counter e.g. stream watermarking, but at a certain point you reach diminishing returns, as the browser is only so secure.

If I was running a drug cartel, it'd be appropriate COMSEC, but for me its really more of an experiment than anything else.

Well, there are many uses. Impopular speech is in theory protected by free speech laws, but in practice you are only safe doing popular speech. Anyone that says something impopular should use COMSEC. It might not be needed today, but I'd use it to be safe tomorrow.

Free speech is an ideal I hold closely, and I would rather let myself be locked up, with all that entails, than acquiesce to governance that required I renounce it.

So if I no longer live in a country that feels as I do, which I very sincerely doubt, let come what may.

@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/

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