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GlobaLeaks: Open-Source Whistleblowing Software
- alexandercrohde 8y agoI don't get why we are making websites that are supposed to be whistle-blowing platforms. It's already been established that numerous corruptible parties can break https (e.g. by hacking a cert). Depending on the nature of the leak, perhaps it'd be best to get it into a safe public store that won't be disappeared (e.g. the blockchain) in an encrypted fashion, and then release the key to select parties.
- therein 8y agoThere is really no reason to involve the blockchain here unless you care about who leaked it first and who gets to claim credit for it. Just put it up as a torrent and share the magnet link.
- subcosmos 8y agoOr you want to make a fortune on a new LeakCoinTokenICNo What would get the most buzz? FreedomChain?
- tajen 8y agoThe IP of the source torrent is published.
- Sir_Substance 8y agoSo stick a raspberry pi rigged to automatically upload the file in your pocket and go use the free wifi at your local library?
- senectus1 8y agogiven how many camera's are around I wouldn't be surprised if they tracked you down fairly quickly.
- GW150914 8y agoHow about bolting it to a small drone and flying around until you find an open WiFi you can use? Then fly it into the nearest body of water.
- Sir_Substance 8y agoPossibly, depends on how generic a drone you can get though, it might be possible to trace through the drone purchase and/or serial number. If you don't care about time and are willing to spend a bit of money, you could potentially attach an automatic wifi connecting and uploading raspberry pi or similar to the underside of a random car and just let it drive around. In most cities it'll eventually park near an open wifi. You might want to deploy two or three I guess.
- Sir_Substance 8y agoMy pockets are generally opaque.
- nyolfen 8y agothat’s exactly what assange did with his insurance file, and the guardian editor he was in contact with published the password for the archive of unredacted diplomatic cables in a book
- endgame 8y agoI can imagine a file-hosting blockchain platform that pays out people who host, and charges people who request files. The tokens to participate in the service then get sold on the usual exchanges.
- jdc 8y agoWho can break it with HKPK enabled?
- schoen 8y agoNote that HPKP enforcement is being dropped as a mainstream browser feature, so we may not be able to rely on this particular argument much in the future. (Although an attacker might not know for sure whether some target might not still be enforcing a pin, presumably not many sites will keep announcing pins at some point.)
- Avamander 8y agoIt's really a pity they're removing the functionality. Would it be possible to have a browser extension enforce it?
- schoen 8y agoThat would be interesting. It sounds like the deprecation became effective and Chrome stopped enforcing it just two weeks ago. I don't know whether Chrome provides appropriate extension APIs to allow an extension to do this, but I have a number of colleagues who work on browser extension development whom I could ask.
- a1369209993 8y ago> and then release the key to select parties. Don't do this; it has all the same problems of just giving the data to select parties directly. Instead use http://www.gwern.net/Self-decrypting-files http://www.gwern.net/Self-decrypting-files and post that to the blockchain. This ensures that anyone can access the data without depending on a trusted third party, but the data will already be irrevocably committed by the time anyone realizes that they want to censor it. Then publish the decryption key for convenience; if that get censored, it's merely mildly annoying.
- schoen 8y ago> It's already been established that numerous corruptible parties can break https (e.g. by hacking a cert). * Scandal and investigation when they do, potentially leading to removal of trust from an associated CA. * Easier and easier to detect (recently mandatory disclosure of all publicly-trusted certs https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/ct-policy/wHILiYf31DE https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/ct-po... and you can sign up to get alerts when a certificate is logged for a particular domain name). * Onion sites also derive cryptographic security from the onion name itself. (I'm working on getting them to be allowed to have DV certs, but even without certs, the onion rendezvous protocol confirms that you've reached a party that controls a key specified in the name itself.) (Someone else mentioned HPKP, which I've also touted in the past as improving HTTPS security, but it seems HPKP enforcement is going away, so we can't necessarily tout it for this purpose anymore...)
- a1369209993 8y ago> Onion sites also derive cryptographic security from the onion name itself. (I'm working on getting them to be allowed to have DV certs, Is it possible to derive a fully secure HTTPS-or-equivalent connection purely from the site's curve25519 key? It seems like that would make DV (and CAs in general) completely redundant. (And if not, is there a explanation of why not?)
- Boulth 8y agoThat's basically what onion addresses v3 are.
- schoen 8y agoI wrote an explanation about why not in https://cabforum.org/pipermail/public/2017-November/012451.html https://cabforum.org/pipermail/public/2017-November/012451.h... See the section "Why do people want certificates for onion names?". It's correct that both v2 and v3 onions provide end-to-end encryption based on the onion service key. In v3 onions that encryption uses more modern cryptographic primitives than in v2 onions, so the incremental cryptographic benefit would be much larger in v2, where unfortunately for historical reasons the CA industry is reluctant to allow DV certs.
- mirimir 8y agoRecipients can setup as a Tor onion service. Just as with SecureDrop. Or sources can just publish using OnionShare.
- jampekka 8y agoGlobaLeaks is very explicit, also to the user, that HTTPS is not secure and strongly recommends using tor.
- arkadiyt 8y agoI think SecureDrop is the gold standard in this area - does GlobaLeaks offer anything over SecureDrop?
- schoen 8y agoI haven't seen a feature comparison recently (I remember a panel discussion about this some years ago, but don't recall much substance), but I just wanted to point out that GlobaLeaks is a similar age to SecureDrop and may well be pretty mature. My impression is that SecureDrop is developed mainly by Americans and GlobaLeaks mainly by Europeans, and each might also have been deployed primarily on the continent where it was developed. If my impression is right, there might be an ongoing reason that particular groups of people are more familiar with one than the other.
- tgragnato 8y agoSide note, but GlobaLeaks requires JavaScript. This is an issue if you fear someone might try to exploit your browser.
- jerheinze 8y ago> Side note, but GlobaLeaks requires JavaScript. This is an issue if you fear someone might try to exploit your browser. JS is not the only surface attack. Also what's the point of targeting anyone who goes into *.onion if it risks burning up your high-price exploit?
- Raed667 8y agoIt has been a while since I looked into these 2. But a few years ago, GlobaLeaks was a lot simpler to install and administer than SecureDrop. Which ment smaller organisations could afford to have an instance.
- oldisgold 8y agoGlobaLeaks seems to include some case management feature and be widely used in the field of anticorruption. Maybe the two softwares serve different use cases? https://blog.torproject.org/italian-anti-corruption-authority-anac-adopts-onion-services https://blog.torproject.org/italian-anti-corruption-authorit...
- jakecraige 8y agoFirst step in trying it out requires inputting my full name and email address :/
- gitgud 8y agoDoesn't match up with what they say on the first lines of the readme file ... "GlobaLeaks is open-source / free software intended to enable secure and anonymous whistleblowing initiatives..."
- boomboomsubban 8y agoThat's the first step in trying out the projects public demo, where they host an instance on their servers and give you a subdomain. Setting up your own server does not give them your personal information.
- boramalper 8y agoRelated: SecureDrop - https://securedrop.org/ https://securedrop.org/
- tribby 8y agoI don't really understand the point of this project or similar efforts like securedrop, while understanding their motivation just fine. moving information from point A to point B is a very, very small part of the whistleblowing process, and it's already solved by other projects that are not specific to whistleblowing. trusting the recipient of sensitive information to use it well is a much more difficult problem, and it can't be solved by software. if reality winner had used the intercept's securedrop instance to transmit her information, it clearly wouldn't have prevented them from mishandling it.
- crtasm 8y agoI'm not sure what projects you're thinking of; just moving the info is easy, making it fairly foolproof for a non-techie source to avoid leaving a datatrail while sending infomation+having a dialogue with you is hard.
- tribby 8y agoricochet is a metadata-free chat app with file transfers - it has been audited and uses onion routing in a novel way.
- crtasm 8y agoIt's explicitly presented as experimental software, personally I'd put more trust in Tor browser.
- tribby 8y agowell, don't use either if you're a whistleblower up against an advanced adversary, unless you really have to - that will put you into a very small population for analysis. attacks on tor are, increasingly, attacks on tor browser[1], so I'm not sure I understand your logic there. ricochet has nothing to do with the web, it is not a browser, it just uses a tor process for routing -- tor browser presents a gigantic attack surface that the tor process itself does not. FWIW, there was an issue or PR on github at some point after the ricochet audit about removing the "experimental" warning, I could be misremembering a different conversation but I think the author just wasn't comfortable telling people that using software for this sort of thing isn't inherently high-risk. 1. https://regmedia.co.uk/2016/03/29/alfin.pdf https://regmedia.co.uk/2016/03/29/alfin.pdf
- ljw1001 8y agoThe single biggest "success" of the whole leaks thing has been to help put Trump in office, which shows three things. First, it's ridiculously easy for powerful and dubious players (example here Russian intelligence, not Trump) to twist this well-meaning idea into a horrible parody of itself. Second, the most vulnerable to manipulation from this technique are democracies (and to a much lesser extent) public corporations, who I would argue, are less of a problem than either autocracies or super-rich individuals. You can't embarrass Putin out of office no matter what gets leaked. Anyone who tries to use it against him will fall out of a window and it will be forgotten. Nor can you easily make the Koch brothers behave, even if an award winning journalist writes a best-selling and award winning book about their shenanigans https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0307947904 https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radic...). You'd pretty much have to leak photos of them holding severed heads to get the US government to move against them effectively. Third. Often, it's politically dangerous for a leader to do the 'right thing'. This technique is just as useful to prevent someone from doing the right thing as it is to prevent them from doing the wrong thing. The difference is how controversial the action is, not whether it is right or wrong. So, regardless of whether this can be done securely, it's really important to ask yourself how it is likely to be used, by whom, and to what end. People tend to forget that stuff when they have a cool new technology.
- ljw1001 8y agoSo many down-votes, so few coherent arguments. :) Maybe somebody can show me why I'm wrong in stating that democracies are asymmetrically more vulnerable, or that this can be used as readily by bad actors for bad ends as it can by well-intentioned people for good ends.
- nabla9 8y agoI didn't downvote you, but I can see a reason for downvotes others than your arguments. Maybe this post is not seen as relevant starting point of the discussion you wanted to have.
- 8y ago
- JohnStrangeII 8y agoMy number 1 addresses for whistleblowing would be the NYTimes simultanesously with a German news outlet like Zeit, Spiegel, or Sueddeutsche Zeitung. My number 2 address would be Wikileaks. These have actual, proven expertise in publishing leaks. All those new "leak sites" have a trust problem. Although it's likely that most of them have noble intentions, it's equally likely that some of them have been funded by or have been undermined by intelligence services. I wouldn't even trust any open source software that is specifically developed for leaking sensitive information - it's simply too easy to slip an obfuscated security hole in it, and it's not as if the developers could afford regular professional audits. I suspect some people will downvote me for this, but in highly sensitive matters I'd rather stick to those with a proven track record and evidence of having been persecuted by governments in the past. To the people who think this is paranoid: It's not. Getting informants or people working on their behalf in crypto projects is the bread & butter of what intelligence agencies do, and it's much easier for them than their usual targets such as foreign military and agencies of state adversaries.
- abecedarius 8y agoGlobaLeaks has had at least one professional audit of the software. I haven’t been following in recent years and they should definitely make it easier to find their current status on that score. (I just poked around on mobile and didn’t see it.)
- notveryrational 8y agoThis is about so much more than software...
- antimatterx 8y agoIt seems they got at least one penetration test every year since 2012: https://github.com/globaleaks/GlobaLeaks/wiki/Penetration-Tests https://github.com/globaleaks/GlobaLeaks/wiki/Penetration-Te... Im not that expert to evaluate them but the reviews seems good and performed by relevant auditors to the community.
- charlieanon 8y agoits seems that the same software has been just adopted by the municipal office against fraud and corruption of Madrid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17534287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17534287