55 karma · joined August 19, 2018
Very early alpha version is available here: https://ambience.sourcecode.ai if someone is interested in checking it out.
There's huge amount of other ways how data can be exfiltrated if one wishes to do so, from domain fronting, DNS level (you can easily tunnel data via DNS), forcing OS and/or whitelisted application to do it on your behalf (haven't tried but I think the files where rules are stored is readable by current user/process?). Such techniques can bypass even insanely expensive network IDS taps if there is enough incentive on the attacker side. I would never expect Little Snitch to be on the same level as those expensive network taps.
I think the use case people now forget is preventing applications to send meaningful data to analytic services like google ad-sense and similar or sending full data payloads (like http body). For this it's good enough. If your worry is about advanced techniques that would exfiltrate the data via DNS tunneling, partial TCP handshakes or forcing to do the connection/beacon on OS level for you then Little Snitch isn't going to help you and your problem is somewhere else. The last Electron wrapped application you downloaded that is packed with 5+ ad services isn't going to do that so it can get your IP.
On the other hand the wording may have been changed slightly and their use of "data" word so it doesn't give user the wrong impression but there is also a balance between explaining in 1-2 sentences what it does and writing 20 page document just to explain that and be technically correct in every word.
Around a year ago I needed to obtain an aerial map of some specific area, but due to recent drastic changes (construction work) and poor quality of the public maps I had to somehow create my own. I fly drones for recreational purposes so I was thinking about using it to make that map when I found out about ODM which is exactly what I was looking for. ODM itself just processes already obtained images (AFAIK) so there is also a whole process of getting them from drone. That's when I found about other software for planning fully automated flight paths so there is a perfect overlap between the photos (required for quality maps and 3D reconstruction). I managed to make a high quality map with 1px:1cm ratio via ODM that I still use from time to time.
Like I mentioned if you own a drone I would recommend to try it out even if it's just for fun as for my case I learned a lot of other stuff I didn't knew before like that automated flight path planning.
The point of that project is that you can create or use an existing repository proxies and attach to it what I called "audit policies" those are basically a list of packages/versions you want to block or allow. The default ones include for example malicious, vulnerable, yanked packages etc... (the blacklist repository) to which you point pip, poetry etc... and it will block installation of the packages listed in the audit policies attached to the repository. You can also create ad-hoc repositories or repository per project to keep it separate and operate in whitelist mode where you allow only whitelisted&audited packages.
On top of that there is also "monitor" mode where you can allow installation of any package or subsset of packages and it will capture all depedencies for purpose of tracking the software supply chain accross the company or project and those packages would be automatically scanned and audit using integration with another project of mine called Aura that is a static analysis scanner designed for the python supply chain.
As mentioned this is currently in open alpha mode so access is limited and user registration is not open (I am currently working on users&permissions for making their own repositories and audit policies) but if someone is interested in testing or this project in general or an early access to features behind the curtain feel free to shoot me an email at admin @ sourcecode.ai . The license is open source so it can be also self-hosted.
Initially, I tried to restore the system via Virtualbox where I installed Mojave via Apple Configurator but that didn't work as it break during the revival of the last step because of the constant USB de-plugging from host/guest machine during the process. I think just the revival step in 2.12 should also work as it flashes also the bridge os and power it up which should avoid any data loss but don't take this for granted.
This was how I got my previous job, which I already left to fund a startup for providing reconnaissance/OSINT as a service but that's another even longer story.