We live in a surveillance state. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies have access to a huge amount of data about us, enabling them to learn intimate, private details about our lives. In part, the ease with which they can obtain such information reflects the fact that our laws have failed to keep up with advances in technology. However, privacy enhancing technologies can offer real protections even when the law does not. That intelligence agencies like the NSA are able to collect records about every telephone call made in the United States, or engage in the bulk surveillance of Internet communications is only possible because so much of our data is transmitted in the clear. The privacy enhancing technologies required to make bulk surveillance impossible and targeted surveillance more difficult already exist. We just need to start using them.
Making promises about security without explaining the tradeoffs you made in order to appeal to the average user is unethical. Tradeoffs are necessary - but self-serving tradeoffs are not, and it’s your responsibility to clearly explain the drawbacks and advantages of the tradeoffs you make. If you make broad and inaccurate statements about your communications product being “secure”, then when the political prisoners who believed you are being tortured and hanged, it’s on you. The stakes are serious. Let me explain why I don’t think Signal takes them seriously.
XMPP is the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, a set of open technologies for instant messaging, presence, multi-party chat, voice and video calls, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, and generalized routing of XML data.
Converse is a web based XMPP/Jabber chat client. You can either use it as a webchat app, or you can integrate it into your own website. It's 100% client-side JavaScript, HTML and CSS and the only backend required is a modern XMPP server.
Dino is a modern open-source chat client for the desktop. It focuses on providing a clean and reliable Jabber/XMPP experience while having your privacy in mind.
Pidgin is a chat program which lets you log into accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on XMPP and sitting in an IRC channel at the same time. Pidgin runs on Windows, Linux, and other UNIX-like operating systems. Looking for Pidgin for OS X? Try Adium! Pidgin is compatible with the following chat networks out of the box: Jabber/XMPP, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, and Zephyr. It can support many more with plugins. Pidgin supports many features of these chat networks, such as file transfers, away messages, buddy icons, custom smileys, and typing notifications. Numerous plugins also extend Pidgin’s functionality above and beyond the standard features.
ejabberd is a distributed, fault-tolerant technology that allows the creation of large-scale instant messaging applications. The server can reliably support thousands of simultaneous users on a single node and has been designed to provide exceptional standards of fault tolerance. As an open source technology, based on industry-standards, ejabberd can be used to build bespoke solutions very cost effectively.
Prosody is a modern XMPP communication server. It aims to be easy to set up and configure, and efficient with system resources. Additionally, for developers it aims to be easy to extend and give a flexible system on which to rapidly develop added functionality, or prototype new protocols. Prosody is open-source software under the permissive MIT/X11 license.
Tinfoil Chat (TFC) is a FOSS+FHD peer-to-peer messaging system that relies on high assurance hardware architecture to protect users from passive collection, MITM attacks and most importantly, remote key exfiltration. TFC is designed for people with one of the most complex threat models: organized crime groups and nation state hackers who bypass end-to-end encryption of traditional secure messaging apps by hacking the endpoint.
Zulip is a powerful, open source group chat application that combines the immediacy of real-time chat with the productivity benefits of threaded conversations. Zulip is used by open source projects, Fortune 500 companies, large standards bodies, and others who need a real-time chat system that allows users to easily process hundreds or thousands of messages a day. With over 500 contributors merging over 500 commits a month, Zulip is also the largest and fastest growing open source group chat project.
Jitsi is a set of open-source projects that allows you to easily build and deploy secure videoconferencing solutions. At the heart of Jitsi are Jitsi Videobridge and Jitsi Meet, which let you have conferences on the internet, while other projects in the community enable other features such as audio, dial-in, recording, and simulcasting.
Retroshare establish encrypted connections between you and your friends to create a network of computers, and provides various distributed services on top of it: forums, channels, chat, mail... Retroshare is fully decentralized, and designed to provide maximum security and anonymity to its users beyond direct friends. Retroshare is entirely free and open-source software. It is available on Android, Linux, MacOS and Windows. There are no hidden costs, no ads and no terms of service.
We develop a novel approach for unveiling the identity of speakers who participate in encrypted voice communication, solely by eavesdropping on the encrypted traffic. Our approach exploits the concept of voice activity detection (VAD), a widely used technique for reducing the bandwidth consumption of voice traffic. We show that the reduction of traffic caused by VAD techniques creates patterns in the encrypted traffic, which in turn reveal the patterns of pauses in the underlying voice stream. We show that these patterns are speaker-characteristic, and that they are sufficient to undermine the anonymity of the speaker in encrypted voice communication. In an empirical setup with 20 speakers our analysis is able to correctly identify an unknown speaker in about 48% of all cases. Our work extends and generalizes existing work that exploits variable bit-rate encoding for identifying the conversation language and content of encrypted voice streams)
When you share an electronic copy of certain Office documents with clients or colleagues, it is a good idea to review the document for hidden data or personal information. You can remove this hidden information before you share the document with other people. The Document Inspector feature in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Visio can help you find and remove hidden data and personal information in documents that you plan to share.
Digital watermarking has become crucially important in authentication and copyright protection of the digital contents, since more and more data are daily generated and shared online through digital archives, blogs and social networks. Out of all, text watermarking is a more difficult task in comparison to other media watermarking. Text cannot be always converted into image, it accounts for a far smaller amount of data (eg. social network posts) and the changes in short texts would strongly affect the meaning or the overall visual form. In this paper we propose a text watermarking technique based on homoglyph characters substitution for latin symbols1. The proposed method is able to efficiently embed a password based watermark in short texts by strictly preserving the content. In particular, it uses alternative Unicode symbols to ensure visual indistinguishability and length preservation, namely content-preservation. To evaluate our method, we use a real dataset of 1.8 million New York articles. The results show the effectiveness of our approach providing an average length of 101 characters needed to embed a 64bit password based watermark.
DEDA - tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation toolkit; Document Colour Tracking Dots, or yellow dots, are small systematic dots which encode information about the printer and/or the printout itself. This process is integrated in almost every commercial colour laser printer. This means that almost every printout contains coded information about the source device, such as the serial number.
Contrary to popular belief, the paperless office has not yet established itself. Printer forensics is therefore still an important field today to protect the reliability of printed documents or to track criminals. An important task of this is to identify the source device of a printed document. There are many forensic approaches that try to determine the source device automatically and with commercially available recording devices. However, it is difficult to find intrinsic signatures that are robust against a variety of influences of the printing process and at the same time can identify the specific source device. In most cases, the identification rate only reaches up to the printer model. For this reason we reviewed document colour tracking dots, an extrinsic signature embedded in nearly all modern colour laser printers. We developed a refined and generic extraction algorithm, found a new tracking dot pattern and decoded pattern information. Through out we propose to reuse document colour tracking dots, in combination with passive printer forensic methods. From privacy perspective we additional investigated anonymization approaches to defeat arbitrary tracking. Finally we propose our toolkitdeda which implements the entire workflow of extracting, analysing and anonymisation of a tracking dot pattern.
We present decoy routing, a mechanism capable of circumventing common network filtering strategies. Unlike other circumvention techniques, decoy routing does not require a client to connect to a specific IP address (which is easily blocked) in order to provide circumvention. We show that if it is possible for a client to connect to any unblocked host/service, then decoy routing could be used to connect them to a blocked destination without coop- eration from the host. This is accomplished by placing the circumvention service in the network itself – where a single device could proxy traffic between a significant fraction of hosts – instead of at the edge.
This is a protocol obfuscation layer for TCP protocols. Its purpose is to keep a third party from telling what protocol is in use based on message contents. Unlike obfs3, obfs4 attempts to provide authentication and data integrity, though it is still designed primarily around providing a layer of obfuscation for an existing authenticated protocol like SSH or TLS.
This is a protocol obfuscation layer for TCP protocols. Its purpose is to keep a third party from telling what protocol is in use based on message contents. Like obfs2, it does not provide authentication or data integrity. It does not hide data lengths. It is more suitable for providing a layer of obfuscation for an existing authenticated protocol, like SSH or TLS.
Networks don't need to be hacked for information to be compromised. This is particularly true for organizations that are trying to keep trade secrets. While we hear a lot about personal privacy, little is said in regard to organizational privacy. Organizations, in fact, leak information at a much greater rate than individuals, and usually do so with little fanfare. There are greater consequences for organizations when information is leaked because the secrets often fall into the hands of competitors. This talk uses a variety of real world examples to show how trade secrets are leaked online, and how organizational privacy is compromised by seemingly innocent use of The Internet.
A new threat actor Kaspersky calls SandCat, believed to be Uzbekistan’s intelligence agency, is so bad at operational security, researchers have found multiple zero-day exploits used by the group, and even caught malware the group was still developing.
The Internet is full of commercial activity and it should come at no surprise that even illegal commercial activity is widespread as well. In this article we would like to describe the current developments - from where we came, where we are now, and where it might be going - when it comes to technologies used for digital black market activity. We will refrain from any legal, moral or ethical judgment on these activities but focus on the technical and operational security aspects. What is illegal and unethical trade for one is perfectly legal for another. Judge for yourself.
This is a step-by-step guide to configuring and managing a domain, remote server and hosted services, such as VPN, a private and obfuscated Tor bridge, and encrypted chat, using the Debian GNU/Linux operating system and other free software.
The art and science of concealing stuff inside other stuff is what we know as steganography. People have used it for ages to keep adversaries from looking at their secret information. In this presentation, we look specifically at malware writers and how they are using steganography to hide malicious data in strange places.
PORTAL is a project that aims to keep people out of jail. It is a dedicated hardware device (a router) which forces all internet traffic to be sent over the Tor network. This significantly increases the odds of using Tor effectively, and reduces the potential to make fatal mistakes.
This will guide you through configuring an Arch based RaspberryPi installation which transparently forwards all TCP traffic over the Tor network. There is also a Tor SOCKS proxy for explicitly interacting with the Tor network, either for more security, or to access a Hidden Service.
Nyx is a command-line monitor for Tor. With this you can get detailed real-time information about your relay such as bandwidth usage, connections, logs, and much more.
Stem is a Python controller library for Tor. With it you can use Tor's control protocol to script against the Tor process, or build things such as Nyx.
OnionShare is an open source tool for securely and anonymously sending and receiving files using Tor onion services. It works by starting a web server directly on your computer and making it accessible as an unguessable Tor web address that others can load in Tor Browser to download files from you, or upload files to you. It doesn't require setting up a separate server, using a third party file-sharing service, or even logging into an account. Unlike services like email, Google Drive, DropBox, WeTransfer, or nearly any other way people typically send files to each other, when you use OnionShare you don't give any companies access to the files that you're sharing. So long as you share the unguessable web address in a secure way (like pasting it in an encrypted messaging app), no one but you and the person you're sharing with can access the files.
The Tor network is designed to provide users with low- latency anonymous communications. Tor clients build circuits with publicly listed relays to anonymously reach their destinations. However, since the relays are publicly listed, they can be easily blocked by censoring adversaries. Consequently, the Tor project envisioned the possibility of unlisted entry points to the Tor network, commonly known as bridges. We address the issue of preventing censors from detecting the bridges by observing the communications between them and nodes in their network. We propose a model in which the client obfuscates its messages to the bridge in a widely used protocol over the Inter- net. We investigate using Skype video calls as our target protocol and our goal is to make it difficult for the censor- ing adversary to distinguish between the obfuscated bridge connections and actual Skype calls using statistical compar- isons. We have implemented our model as a proof-of-concept pluggable transport for Tor, which is available under an open-source licence. Using this implementation we observed the obfuscated bridge communications and compared it with those of Skype calls and presented the results.
Internet censorship by governments is an increasingly common practice worldwide. Internet users and censors are locked in an arms race: as users find ways to evade censorship schemes, the censors develop countermeasures for the evasion tactics. One of the most popular and effective circumvention tools, Tor, must regularly adjust its network traffic signature to remain usable. We present StegoTorus, a tool that comprehensively disguises Tor from protocol analysis. To foil analysis of packet contents, Tor’s traffic is steganographed to resemble an innocuous cover protocol, such as HTTP. To foil analysis at the transport level, the Tor circuit is distributed over many shorter-lived connections with per-packet characteristics that mimic cover-protocol traffic. Our evaluation demonstrates that StegoTorus improves the resilience of Tor to fingerprinting attacks and delivers usable performance.
In this research project, we were monitoring all exit relays for several months in order to expose, document, and thwart malicious or misconfigured relays. In particular, we monitor exit relays with two scanners we developed specifically for that purpose: exitmap and HoneyConnector. Since September 2013, we discovered 65 malicious or misconfigured exit relays which are listed in Table 1 and Table 2 in our research paper. These exit relays engaged in various attacks such as SSH and HTTPS MitM, HTML injection, SSL stripping, and traffic sniffing. We also found exit relays which were unintentionally interfering with network traffic because they were subject to DNS censorship.
After several years of research on onion routing, Camenisch and Lysyanskaya, in an attempt at rigorous analysis, defined an ideal functionality in the universal composability model, together with properties that protocols have to meet to achieve provable security. A whole family of systems based their security proofs on this work. However, analyzing HORNET and Sphinx, two instances from this family, we show that this proof strategy is broken. We discover a previously unknown vulnerability that breaks anonymity completely, and explain a known one. Both should not exist if privacy is proven correctly. In this work, we analyze and fix the proof strategy used for this family of systems. After proving the efficacy of the ideal functionality, we show how the original properties are flawed and suggest improved, effective properties in their place. Finally, we discover another common mistake in the proofs. We demonstrate how to avoid it by showing our improved properties for one protocol, thus partially fixing the family of provably secure onion routing protocols.
You might be familiar with the website Let Me Google That For You - which allow someone to send a passive aggressive link to someone too lazy to seach online by themself - well LMGTFY allow you to shorten this link and it appears that the URLs created are sequencial! So, naturally, someone had to poll those URLs to obtain all the queries.
fteproxy is fast, free, open source, and cross platform. It has been shown to circumvent network monitoring software such as bro, YAF, nProbe, l7-filter, and appid, as well as closed-source commercial DPI systems
Streisand sets up a new server running L2TP/IPsec, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, Shadowsocks, sslh, Stunnel, and a Tor bridge. It also generates custom configuration instructions for all of these services. At the end of the run you are given an HTML file with instructions that can be shared with friends, family members, and fellow activists.
Exitmap is a fast and modular Python-based scanner for Tor exit relays. Exitmap modules implement tasks that are run over (a subset of) all exit relays. If you have a background in functional programming, think of exitmap as a map() interface for Tor exit relays. Modules can perform any TCP-based networking task; fetching a web page, uploading a file, connecting to an SSH server, or joining an IRC channel.
Protects you against tracking through "free", centralized, content delivery. It prevents a lot of requests from reaching networks like Google Hosted Libraries, and serves local files to keep sites from breaking. Complements regular content blockers.
A web browser extension that emulates Content Delivery Networks to improve your online privacy. It intercepts traffic, finds supported resources locally, and injects them into the environment. All of this happens automatically, so no prior configuration is required.
meek is a blocking-resistant pluggable transport for Tor. It encodes a data stream as a sequence of HTTPS requests and responses. Requests are reflected through a hard-to-block third-party web server in order to avoid talking directly to a Tor bridge. HTTPS encryption hides fingerprintable byte patterns in Tor traffic.sek
We've all seen the steady stream of revelations about the NSA's unconstitutional, illegal mass surveillance. Seems like there's a new transgression revealed every week! I'm getting outrage fatigue. So I decided to fight back... by looking for practical, realistic, everyday actions I can take to protect my privacy and civil liberties on the Internet, and sharing them with my friends. Join me in using encryption and privacy technology to resist eavesdropping and tracking, and to start to opt out of the bulk data collection that the NSA has unilaterally decided to secretly impose upon the world. Let's take back the Internet, one encrypted bit at a time.
Adversarial attacks on machine learning models have seen increasing interest in the past years. By making only subtle changes to the input of a convolutional neural network, the output of the network can be swayed to output a completely different result. The first attacks did this by changing pixel values of an input image slightly to fool a classifier to output the wrong class. Other approaches have tried to learn "patches" that can be applied to an object to fool detectors and classifiers. Some of these approaches have also shown that these attacks are feasible in the real-world, i.e. by modifying an object and filming it with a video camera. However, all of these approaches target classes that contain almost no intra-class variety (e.g. stop signs). The known structure of the object is then used to generate an adversarial patch on top of it. In this paper, we present an approach to generate adversarial patches to targets with lots of intra-class variety, namely persons. The goal is to generate a patch that is able successfully hide a person from a person detector. An attack that could for instance be used maliciously to circumvent surveillance systems, intruders can sneak around undetected by holding a small cardboard plate in front of their body aimed towards the surveillance camera. From our results we can see that our system is able significantly lower the accuracy of a person detector. Our approach also functions well in real-life scenarios where the patch is filmed by a camera. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to attempt this kind of attack on targets with a high level of intra-class variety like persons.
This short talk will cover the standards, devices and implementation of a mandatory part of our western Internet infrastructure. The central question is whether an overarching interception functionality might actually put national Internet infrastructure at a higher risk of being attacked successfully. The question is approached in this talk from a purely technical point of view, looking at how LI functionality is implemented by a major vendor and what issues arise from that implementation. Routers and other devices may get hurt in the process.
Sometimes, hiding the existence of a communication is as important as hiding the contents of that communication. While simple network tunneling such as Tor or a VPN can keep the contents of communications confidential, under active network monitoring or a restrictive IDS such tunnels are red flags which can subject the user to extreme scrutiny. Format-Transforming Encryption FTE can be used to tunnel traffic within otherwise innocuous protocols, keeping both the contents and existence of the sensitive traffic hidden. However, more advanced automated intrusion detection, or moderately sophisticated manual inspection, raise other red flags when a host reporting to be a laser printer starts browsing the web or opening IM sessions, or when a machine which appears to be a Mac laptop sends network traffic using Windows-specific network settings. We present Masquerade: a system which combines FTE and host OS profile selection to allow the user to emulate a user-selected operating system and application-set in network traffic and settings, evading both automated detection and frustrating after-the-fact analysis.
This talk will focus on mobile and foot surveillance techniques used by surveillance teams. It will also include tips on identifying if you are under surveillance and how to make their life difficult.
This paper will review Cisco's architecture for lawful intercept from asecurity perspective. We explain how a number of different weaknesses in its design coupled with publicly disclosed security vulnerabilities could enable a malicious person to access the interface and spy on communications without leaving a trace. We then provide a set of recommendations for the redesign of the interface as well as SNMP authentication in general to better mitigate the security risks.
Deep packet inspection (DPI) technologies provide much needed visibility and control of network traffic using port- independent protocol identification, where a network flow is labeled with its application-layer protocol based on packet contents. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive evaluation of a large set of DPI systems from the point of view of protocol misidentification attacks, in which adver- saries on the network attempt to force the DPI to mislabel connections. Our approach uses a new cryptographic prim- itive called format-transforming encryption (FTE), which extends conventional symmetric encryption with the ability to transform the ciphertext into a format of our choosing. We design an FTE-based record layer that can encrypt arbitrary application-layer traffic, and we experimentally show that this forces misidentification for all of the evaluated DPI systems. This set includes a proprietary, enterprise-class DPI system used by large corporations and nation-states. We also show that using FTE as a proxy system incurs no latency overhead and as little as 16% bandwidth overhead compared to standard SSH tunnels. Finally, we integrate our FTE proxy into the Tor anonymity network and demon- strate that it evades real-world censorship by the Great Fire- wall of China
Deep packet inspection DPI technologies provide much- needed visibility and control of network traffic using port- independent protocol identification, where a network ow is labeled with its application-layer protocol based on packet contents. In this paper, we provide the most comprehensive evaluation of a large set of DPI systems from the point of view of protocol misidentification attacks, in which adver- saries on the network attempt to force the DPI to mislabel connections. Our approach uses a new cryptographic primitive called format-transforming encryption FTE, which extends conventional symmetric encryption with the ability to transform the ciphertext into a format of our choosing. We design an FTE-based record layer that can encrypt arbi- trary application-layer traffic, and we experimentally show that this forces misidentification for all of the evaluated DPI systems. This set includes a proprietary, enterprise-class DPI system used by large corporations and nation-states. We also show that using FTE as a proxy system incurs no latency overhead and as little as 16% bandwidth overhead compared to standard SSH tunnels. Finally, we integrate our FTE proxy into the Tor anonymity network and demonstrate that it evades real-world censorship by the Great Firewall of China.
Many countries and administrative domains exploit control over their communication infrastructure to censor online content. This paper presents the design, im plementation and evaluation of Kaleidoscope , a peer-to-peer system of relays that enables users within a censored domain to access blocked content. The main challenge facing Kaleidoscope is to resist the cens or’s efforts to block the circumvention system itself. Kaleidoscope achieves blocking-resilienc e using restricted service discovery that allows each user to discover a small set of unblocked relays while only exposing a small fraction of relays to the censor. To restrict service discovery, Kaleidoscope leverages a trust network where links reflects real-world social relationships among users and uses a limited advertisement protocol based on random routes to disseminate relay addresses along the trust netwo rk; the number of nodes reached by a relay advertisement should ideally be inversely proportional to the maximum fraction of infiltration and is independent of the network size. To increase service availa bility in large networks with few exit relay nodes, Kaleidoscope forwards the actual data traffic across multiple relay hops without risking exposure of exit relays. Using detailed analysis and simulations, we show that Kaleidoscope provides > 90% service availability even under substantial infiltration (close to 0.5% of edges) and when only 30% of the relay nodes are online. We have implemented and deployed our system on a small scale serving over 100,000 requests to 40 censored users (relatively small user base to realize Kaleidoscope’s anti-blocking guarantees) spread across different countries and administrative domains over a 6-month period
Oppressive regimes and even democratic governments restrict Internet access. Existing anti-censorship systems often require users to connect through proxies, but these systems are relatively easy for a censor to discover and block. This paper offers a possible next step in the cen- sorship arms race: rather than relying on a single system or set of proxies to circumvent censorship firewalls, we explore whether the vast deployment of sites that host user-generated content can breach these firewalls. To explore this possibility, we have developed Collage, which allows users to exchange messages through hidden chan- nels in sites that host user-generated content. Collage has two components: a message vector layer for embedding content in cover traffic; and a rendezvous mechanism to allow parties to publish and retrieve messages in the cover traffic. Collage uses user-generated content (e.g. , photo-sharing sites) as “drop sites” for hidden messages. To send a message, a user embeds it into cover traffic and posts the content on some site, where receivers retrieve this content using a sequence of tasks. Collage makes it difficult for a censor to monitor or block these messages by exploiting the sheer number of sites where users can exchange messages and the variety of ways that a mes- sage can be hidden. Our evaluation of Collage shows that the performance overhead is acceptable for sending small messages (e.g., Web articles, email). We show how Collage can be used to build two applications: a direct messaging application, and a Web content delivery system
Many users face surveillance of their Internet communications and a significant fraction suffer from outright blocking of certain destinations. Anonymous communication systems allow users to conceal the destinations they communicate with, but do not hide the fact that the users are using them. The mere use of such systems may invite suspicion, or access to them may be blocked. We therefore propose Cirripede, a system that can be used for unobservable communication with Internet destinations. Cirripede is designed to be deployed by ISPs; it intercepts connections from clients to innocent-looking desti- nations and redirects them to the true destination requested by the client. The communication is encoded in a way that is indistinguishable from normal communications to anyone without the master secret key, while public-key cryptogra- phy is used to eliminate the need for any secret information that must be shared with Cirripede users. Cirripede is designed to work scalably with routers that handle large volumes of traffic while imposing minimal over- head on ISPs and not disrupting existing traffic. This allows Cirripede proxies to be strategically deployed at central lo- cations, making access to Cirripede very difficult to block. We built a proof-of-concept implementation of Cirripede and performed a testbed evaluation of its performance proper- ties
In response to increasingly sophisticated state-sponsored Internet censorship, recent work has proposed a new ap- proach to censorship resistance: end-to-middle proxying. This concept, developed in systems such as Telex, Decoy Routing, and Cirripede, moves anticensorship technology into the core of the network, at large ISPs outside the censoring country. In this paper, we focus on two technical obstacles to the deployment of certain end-to-middle schemes: the need to selectively block flows and the need to observe both directions of a connection. We propose a new construction, TapDance, that removes these require- ments. TapDance employs a novel TCP-level technique that allows the anticensorship station at an ISP to function as a passive network tap, without an inline blocking com- ponent. We also apply a novel steganographic encoding to embed control messages in TLS ciphertext, allowing us to operate on HTTPS connections even under asymmetric routing. We implement and evaluate a TapDance proto- type that demonstrates how the system could function with minimal impact on an ISP’s network operations.
Founded in 1987 and located near Boston Massachusetts, Granite Island Group, is the internationally recognized leader in the field of Electronics Engineering, Technical Surveillance Counter Measures (TSCM), Bug Sweeps, Wiretap Detection, Surveillance Technology, Communications Security (COMSEC), Counter-Intelligence, Technical Security, and Spy Hunting. Granite Island Group provides expert technical, analytical and research capability for the detection, nullification, and isolation of eavesdropping devices, technical surveillance penetrations, technical surveillance hazards, and physical security weaknesses.
Salamandra is a tool to detect and locate spy microphones in closed environments. It find microphones based on the strength of the signal sent by the microphone and the amount of noise and overlapped frequencies. Based on the generated noise it can estimate how close or far away you are from the microphone.
Propaganda, an influential book written by Edward L. Bernays in 1928, incorporated the literature from social science and psychological manipulation into an examination of the techniques of public communication. Bernays wrote the book in response to the success of some of his earlier works such as Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and A Public Relations Counsel (1927). Propaganda explored the psychology behind manipulating masses and the ability to use symbolic action and propaganda to influence politics, effect social change, and lobby for gender and racial equality.[1] Walter Lippman was Bernays' unacknowledged American mentor and his work The Phantom Public greatly influenced the ideas expressed in Propaganda a year later.[2] The work propelled Bernays into media historians' view of him as the "father of public relations."[3]
In media studies, concision is a form of broadcast media censorship by limiting debate and discussion of important topics on the rationale of time allotment.
We present a novel eavesdropping technique for spying at a distance on data that is displayed on an arbitrary computer screen, including the currently prevalent LCD monitors. Our technique exploits reflections of the screen’s optical emanations in various objects that one commonly finds in close proximity to the screen and uses those reflections to recover the original screen content. Such objects include eyeglasses, tea pots, spoons, plastic bottles, and even the eye of the user. We have demonstrated that this attack can be successfully mounted to spy on even small fonts using inexpensive, off-the-shelf equipment (less than 1500 dollars) from a distance of up to 10 meters. Relying on more expensive equipment allowed us to conduct this attack from over 30 meters away, demonstrating that similar at- tacks are feasible from the other side of the street or from a close-by building. We additionally establish theoretical limitations of the attack; these limitations may help to estimate the risk that this attack can be successfully mounted in a given environment.
We examine the problem of acoustic emanations of printers. We present a novel attack that recovers what a dot- matrix printer processing English text is printing based on a record of the sound it makes, if the microphone is close enough to the printer. In our experiments, the attack recovers up to 72% of printed words, and up to 95% if we assume contextual knowledge about the text, with a microphone at a distance of 10 cm from the printer. After an upfront training phase, the attack is fully automated and uses a combination of machine learning, audio processing, and speech recognition techniques, including spectrum features, Hidden Markov Models and linear classification; moreover, it allows for feedback-based incremental learning. We evaluate the effectiveness of countermeasures, and we describe how we successfully mounted the attack in-field (with appropriate privacy protections) in a doctor’s practice to recover the content of medical prescriptions.
Reflecting objects such as tea pots and glasses, but also diffusely reflecting objects such as a user’s shirt, can be used to spy on confidential data displayed on a monitor. First, we show how reflections in the user’s eye can be exploited for spying on confidential data. Second, we investigate to what extent monitor images can be reconstructed from the diffuse reflections on a wall or the user’s clothes, and provide information- theoretic bounds limiting this type of attack. Third, we evaluate the effectiveness of several countermeasures
This new white paper, entitled “Understanding and Improving Privacy ‘Audits’ under FTC Orders,” carefully parses the third-party audits that Google and Facebook are required to conduct under their 2012 Federal Trade Commission consent orders. Using only publicly available documents, the article contrasts the FTC’s high expectations for the audits with what the FTC actually received (as released to the public in redacted form). These audits, as a practical matter, are often the only “tooth” in FTC orders to protect consumer privacy. They are critically important to accomplishing the agency’s privacy mission. As such, a failure to attend to their robust enforcement can have unintended consequences, and arguably, provide consumers with a false sense of security. The paper shows how the audits are not actually audits as commonly understood. Instead, because the FTC order language only requires third-party “assessments,” the companies submit reports that are termed “attestations.” Attestations fundamentally rely on a few vague privacy program aspects that are self-selected by the companies themselves. While the FTC could reject attestation-type assessments, the agency could also insist the companies bolster certain characteristics of the attestation assessments to make them more effective and replicate audit attributes. For example, the FTC could require a broader and deeper scope for the assessments. The agency could also require that assessors evaluate Fair Information Practices, data flows, notice/consent effectiveness, all company privacy assurances, and known order violations.
The US government, with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T, has engaged in massive, illegal dragnet surveillance of the domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001. Since this was first reported on by the press and discovered by the public in late 2005, EFF has been at the forefront of the effort to stop it and bring government surveillance programs back within the law and the Constitution.
Edward Snowden has given us an unprecedented window into the NSA's surveillance activities. Drawing from both the Snowden documents and revelations from previous whistleblowers, I will describe the sorts of surveillance the NSA does and how it does it. The emphasis is on the technical capabilities of the NSA, not the politics of their actions. This includes how it conducts Internet surveillance on the backbone, but is primarily focused on their offensive capabilities: packet injection attacks from the Internet backbone, exploits against endpoint computers and implants to exfiltrate information, fingerprinting computers through cookies and other means, and so on. I will then talk about what sorts of countermeasures are likely to frustrate the NSA. Basically, these are techniques to raise the cost of wholesale surveillance in favor of targeted surveillance: encryption, target hardening, dispersal, and so on.
"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A U.S. senator and civil groups critical of surveillance practices on Friday called on the government to release a 2015 order by a secret court directing Yahoo to scan all its users’ incoming email, saying it appeared to involve new interpretations of at least two important legal issues."
In January 2015, the Commission adopted new Enhanced 911 (E911) location accuracy rules and information collection requirements in the Fourth Report and Order in PS Docket No. 07-114. The new rules became effective on April 3, 2015, except for rules containing information collection provisions, which became effective on August 3, 2015 upon approval by the Office of Management and Budget. Below is a summary timeline of compliance deadlines for Commercial Mobile Radio Service (CMRS) providers established by the Fourth Report and Order.
RF-Capture is a device that captures a human figure through walls and occlusions. It transmits wireless signals and reconstructs a human figure by analyzing the signals' reflections. RF-Capture does not require the person to wear any sensor, and its transmitted power is 10,000 times lower than that of a standard cell-phone.
Grassland is a self-organizing, self-correcting and self-financing, P2P network of robot vision software that efficiently scans any 2D video feed from any single-viewpoint camera to generate a compressed, searchable, timestamped, real-time, 3D simulation of the world. The network's game theory based mathematical framework exhibits positive sensitivity to stressors; e.g. censorship makes it stronger, trustlessly learning the socioeconomic and domestic behaviour of political rivals via a prisoner's dilemma. Grassland is open-source and isn't owned or controlled by anyone. It's politically stateless and anyone can take part. Every node in the network has a permissionless and public API giving any external application or computer free access to Grassland data across the entire network, letting any internet connected object trustlessly internalize, understand and interact intuitively with both past and present states of the real world, digitally recreate or respond to even the tiniest changes taking place around the globe, from a butterfly flapping its wings in Calgary, to the lip-read conversations of pedestrians in Buenos Aires, to understanding that a motorcycle is signaling a left turn in Beijing all at zero cost and in real-time. While the combined work of the network makes it computationally intractable for nodes to submit fake data (see proof-of-work description below).
Apparently, this has been changed recently. As per information provided from a recent bug report (https://crbug.com/1039128), Chrome now checks ALL extensions except for the ones on the whitelist. That means when you download almost any file, the checksum and some other information about the file are sent back to Google. It is not clear how this impacts privacy.
This is a dataset of over 7,000,000 transactions scraped from the Venmo public API. Venmo is an app which allows users to easily send and receive money. This data was collected as part of a data analysis project and was scraped during the following date ranges: July 2018 - September 2018; October 2018; Jan 2019 - Feb 2019. I am releasing this dataset in order to bring attention to Venmo users that all of this data is publicly available for anyone to grab without even an API key. There is some very valuable data here for any attacker conducting OSINT research.
An Avast antivirus subsidiary sells 'Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.' Its clients have included Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and McKinsey.
Wifi probes have provided giggles via Karma and Wifi Pineapples for years, but is there more fun to be had? Like going from sitting next to someone on a bus, to knowing where they live and hang out? Why try to MITM someone’s wireless device in an enterprise environment where they may notice — when getting them at their favorite burger joint is much easier. In this talk we will review ways of collecting and analyzing probes. We’ll use the resulting data to figure out where people live, their daily habits, and discuss uses (some nice, some not so nice) for this information. We’ll also dicuss how to make yourself a little less easy to track using these methods. Stingrays are price prohibitive, but for just tracking people’s movements.. this is cheap and easy.
In this paper, we examine how web-based device fingerprinting currently works on the Internet. By analyzing the code of three popular browser-fingerprinting code providers, we reveal the techniques that allow websites to track users without the need of client-side identifiers. Among these techniques, we show how current commercial fingerprinting approaches use questionable practices, such as the circumvention of HTTP proxies to discover a user’s real IP address and the installation of intrusive browser plugins. At the same tim e, we show how fragile the browser ecosystem is against fingerprinting through the use of novel browser- identifying techniques. With so many different vendors involved in browser development, we demonstrate how one can use diversions in the browsers’ implementation to distinguish successfully not only the browser-family, but also specific major and minor versions. Browser extensions that help users spoof the user-agent of their browsers are also evaluated. We show that current commercial approaches can bypass the extensions, and, in addition, take advantage of their shortcomings by using them as additional fingerprinting features.
We present a novel web page fingerprinting attack that is able to defeat several recently proposed defenses against traffic analysis attacks, including the application-level defenses HTTPOS [15] and randomized pipelining over Tor [18]. Regardless of the defense scheme, our attack was able to guess which of 100 web pages a victim was visiting at least 50% of the time and, with some defenses, over 90% of the time. Our attack is based on a simple model of network behavior and out-performs previously proposed ad hoc attacks. We then build a web site fingerprinting attack that is able to identify whether a victim is visiting a particular web site with over 90% accuracy in our experiments. Our results strongly suggest that ad hoc defenses against traffic analysis are not likely to succeed. Consequently, we describe a defense scheme that provides provable security properties, albeit with potentially higher overheads
TZP is only designed for Firefox [v60+] and the Tor Browser [v8+]. Here are additonal tests, and here is the repo [feel free to drop in]. When re-testing sections, be aware that some pref/option changes may require a page refresh [F5] or even a new browser session.
Panopticlick will analyze how well your browser and add-ons protect you against online tracking techniques. We’ll also see if your system is uniquely configured—and thus identifiable—even if you are using privacy-protective software.
This website aims at studying the diversity of browser fingerprints and providing developers with data to help them design good defenses. Contribute to the efforts by viewing your own browser fingerprint or consult the current statistics of data provided by users around the world!
Scuttlebutt is a protocol for building decentralized applications that work well offline and that no one person can control. Because there is no central server, Scuttlebutt clients connect to their peers to exchange information. This guide describes the protocols used to communicate within the Scuttlebutt network. Scuttlebutt is a flexible protocol, capable of supporting many different types of applications. One of its first applications was as a social network, and it has also become one of the most compelling because the people who hang out there are not jerks. This guide has a slight focus on how to use Scuttlebutt for social networking, but many of the explanations will still be useful if want to use it for something completely different, or are just curious how it works.
Serval is a telecommunications system comprised of at least two mobile phones that are able to work outside of regular mobile phone tower range due thanks to the Serval App and Serval Mesh.
This is not a fork. This is a repository of scripts to automatically build Microsoft's vscode repository into freely-licensed binaries with a community-driven default configuration.
ungoogled-chromium is Google Chromium, sans dependency on Google web services. It also features some tweaks to enhance privacy, control, and transparency (almost all of which require manual activation or enabling).