7 ms·

Essays: NSA Surveillance: A Guide to Staying Secure – Schneier on Security

94 points by lifeisstillgood 2y ago

Loic 2y ago
For the context, this from September 6, 2013.
- talldayo 2y ago
  If only we knew how bad things really are.
  - Citizen8396 2y ago
    I completely agree. For example, I don’t think people are aware to what extent China is attempting to infiltrate the US energy sector. No one could imagine to what extent Russia would attempt to influence our elections, either. I’m hopeful it won’t get worse. It probably has something to do with the capabilities others are alluding to in this thread.
throwaway984393 2y ago
[dead]
OutOfHere 2y ago
> I have been using GPG, Silent Circle, Tails, OTR, TrueCrypt, BleachBit, Let's update this for 2024: Signal/Session/Matrix/^, Tails/Whonix/Qubes/Heads/BSDs, VeraCrypt/Cryptomator/^, GrapheneOS/CalyxOS/PureOS/^, KeePassXC/Bitwarden/^, Mullvad, NetGuard(Android) ^ represents others that I am leaving out for convenience.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- maqp 2y ago
  You're missing Tor, and metadata reducing messaging like https://cwtch.im/ https://cwtch.im/ Also Mullvad Browser is a worthy addition given that its basically Tor Browser with the VPN instead of Tor-gateway. Same excellent metadata reduction tweaks, and you don't have to configure anything. Oh and since this is against APTs my work might be useful for messaging: https://github.com/maqp/tfc https://github.com/maqp/tfc It's as close to NSA-proof you can get. Naturally, if the government parks their flower van across the street and grabs your keyboard cable's spurious radio waves* or installs a cam in your house you're SoL, but otherwise you should be pretty good. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)
  - ementally 2y ago
    >basically Tor Browser with the VPN instead of Tor-gateway. You don't need a Mullvad VPN for it work, you can use it without Mullvad VPN or any VPN at all.
    - maqp 2y ago
      Oh interesting, thanks for letting me know!
- zahlman 2y ago
  > Tails/Whonix/Qubes/Heads/BSDs... Mullvad, NetGuard(Android) I don't even know what kind of things these are... ?
  - salawat 2y ago
    Tails is an immutable distribution of Linux that runs entirely out of RAM, persisting nothing to long term disks. Typically used in a LiveCD like manner. https://tails.net/ https://tails.net/ Heads similar. https://heads.dyne.org/ https://heads.dyne.org/ Qubes is an OS endeavoring to isolate literally everything conceivable from each other. https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/ BSD is a kernel specifically focused, iiuc, on being as secure and straightforward as possible. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD Whonix seems to be focused around decreasing online or browser based metadata leakage? Mullvad is a paid VPN service. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whonix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whonix Calyx/Pure/GrapheneOS Apparently security focused Android distros. KeePassXC, password manager, self hosted. TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt: Encrypted volume management. Bitwarden, FDE solution iirc. Notably no mention of Wireguard, managing your firewalls/routers/network architecture, IDS's/Intrusion response plans, key hygiene, and focusing on getting end users prepped for the infosec environment; noting that an ineffective infosec engagement with end users completely undermines everything you're trying to work for. Trying to go all in on most of those tools is a recipe for disaster for any org that actually has something else to do other than jumping through endless security hoops. Tools aren't the be all end all. Educated and invested users are.
    - embeng4096 2y ago
      Just adding a small correction: you might be thinking of Bitlocker for FDE -- Bitwarden is a password manager. Thanks for the details on the other stuff, I didn't know what Whonix and Heads were
    - astrange 2y ago
      > BSD is a kernel specifically focused, iiuc, on being as secure and straightforward as possible. No it is not, or at least it doesn't use any modern tools or make a serious attempt to do so. It's a family of OSes written by the kind of people who think if you grow a beard and stare very hard at your C code it will become secure and bug free. It does change slowly, which is a good technique for avoiding introducing bugs, but it's barely heard of techniques like regression testing. The secure one in particular has a lot of mitigations that especially feel like they just dreamed up what they think a security mitigation is, instead of engaging with research.
- ignoramous 2y ago
  > NetGuard(Android) GrapheneOS warns of NetGuard leaking connections: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/8330-app-compatibility-with-grapheneos/68 https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/8330-app-compatibility-with...
mmh0000 2y ago
If your adversary is someone who can … quite literally … send ninjas in attack helicopters at you. You’re probably going to lose.
- upofadown 2y ago
  The idea is to prevent them from developing a motivation to do that by keeping them out of your business in the first place.
  - mmh0000 2y ago
    I get the motivation. But good luck keeping an organization out of anything you care about when they can: . Legally kill you . Legally compel corporations to embed backdoors . Legally seize all your equipment . Throw away millions of dollars pursing “petty” crimes. Technical means of defending against something like the NSA is, in my opinion, a lost cause. I believe the way to deal with this is by being politically active. Getting people engaged and limiting the powers of these organizations.
    - whatshisface 2y ago
      Becoming politically active is one of the fastest ways to get "legally killed," in countries where that actually happens...
      - paretoer 2y ago
        Totally agree. I would think part of a good defense is to simply not care about politics on any level. Personally, I think all these counter measures are a fool's game. It most likely ends up being a form of self labeling as a person to look into. My defense is to be a boring person, not trying to hide anything, lost in a sea of noise.
    - adolph 2y ago
      > Getting people engaged and limiting the powers of these organizations. My impression is that most people want more government; thus, getting more people engaged will lead to increasing the powers of these organizations.
LennyHenrysNuts 2y ago
What do people think of SimpleX? https://simplex.chat/ https://simplex.chat/
- maqp 2y ago
  There's a LOT of SimpleX shilling lately on HN. tldr, it's snake oil. The company lies about its system being able act as a server without knowing anything about the users. The SimpleX clients don't route via Tor so the server will by definition know the IP addresses of the conversing parties. SimpleX claims to be the most metadata secure app, yet it fails to address the first issue of hiding IP addresses. Also a server has access to each IP addresses' social graph when they see to which target IPs they are forwarding packets. So much for metadata-free.
  - epoberezkin 2y ago
    Either you didn't understand the design, or this is not genuine criticism. Every server that user connects to of course knows IP address of the user, be it Tor relay, VPN provider, Nym node, or SimpleX relay - the user chooses which server to trust. Neither of the approaches guarantees transport anonymity. Recently added private message routing protects IP addresses of the users from the destination servers: https://simplex.chat/blog/20240604-simplex-chat-v5.8-private-message-routing-chat-themes.html https://simplex.chat/blog/20240604-simplex-chat-v5.8-private... , which was #1 point of criticism that IP addresses are not protected by default.
    - maqp 2y ago
      Lol that article says >We believe that Tor may be the wrong solution for some users for one of the reasons: much higher latency, error rate and resource usage. Yet you provide no options for Tor, as in https://simplex.chat/docs/server.html https://simplex.chat/docs/server.html your idea for anonymizing users is... For the user to hop through roughly 20 page document of dozens of commands to create the equivalent of personal VPN server, and amidst it, to connect anonymously to contacts' servers, you need to install... Tor https://simplex.chat/docs/server.html#tor-installation-and-configuration https://simplex.chat/docs/server.html#tor-installation-and-c... So if you don't have any options for Tor, maybe you should just default to Tor. As for the hoops, you know, you can just write an install script for the user to auto-configure this stuff correctly. In its current state it's definitely something an average Joe is going to do. If this is there just to shut down criticism, maybe you should instead address the criticism, and make it metadata-private by default, without these insane hoops. If it doesn't get to the point of anonymity by copying a one-liner that runs an install script, i.e. if it's not on par with sudo apt install simplex, it's not going to catch on. Also, your technical documentation how this stuff actually works has 404 issues https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplexmq/blob/stable/rfcs/2023-09-12-second-relays.md https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplexmq/blob/stable/rfcs/2...
jokoon 2y ago
I don't see why one would try to protect himself from the NSA. I understand privacy from my neighbor and criminals. But I want the government to spy on potential criminals. I trust the courts and the process. If you don't, you're just paranoid.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > But I want the government to spy on potential criminals. > I trust the courts and the process. Good luck then. You _will_ need it.
  - jokoon 2y ago
    Seriously, what are you so afraid of? We don't live in China or Russia, what matters is political culture, not hiding from the government. What is the worst that ever happened? Do you think corporations would use the NSA to influence the government? Or do you think the NSA would become a shadow government? I understand the fear of 1984, but 1984 described China and Russia, not the US. Assange and Snowden might sound like heroes to you, but to me they are not.
    - asudosandwich 2y ago
      Right on. People complained about the camera in my bathroom so I told them the same thing. If you’ve done nothing wrong you should have nothing to hide.
    - mdhb 2y ago
      You aren’t wrong for the most part. HN hive mind has a really bad habit of consistently acting incredibly paranoid while actually doing nothing to actually understand how any of this works either from a legal or technical perspective and then on top of all that they have no understanding of what their actual threat model looks like and anyone who dares to interrupt the paranoia is treated like they are some kind of moron. Honestly it’s like listening to a Q-Anon group in here sometimes.
    - aeonik 2y ago

Loic 2y ago

For the context, this from September 6, 2013.

talldayo 2y ago
If only we knew how bad things really are.
- Citizen8396 2y ago
  I completely agree. For example, I don’t think people are aware to what extent China is attempting to infiltrate the US energy sector. No one could imagine to what extent Russia would attempt to influence our elections, either. I’m hopeful it won’t get worse. It probably has something to do with the capabilities others are alluding to in this thread.

throwaway984393 2y ago

[dead]

OutOfHere 2y ago

> I have been using GPG, Silent Circle, Tails, OTR, TrueCrypt, BleachBit, Let's update this for 2024: Signal/Session/Matrix/^, Tails/Whonix/Qubes/Heads/BSDs, VeraCrypt/Cryptomator/^, GrapheneOS/CalyxOS/PureOS/^, KeePassXC/Bitwarden/^, Mullvad, NetGuard(Android) ^ represents others that I am leaving out for convenience.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
maqp 2y ago
You're missing Tor, and metadata reducing messaging like https://cwtch.im/ https://cwtch.im/ Also Mullvad Browser is a worthy addition given that its basically Tor Browser with the VPN instead of Tor-gateway. Same excellent metadata reduction tweaks, and you don't have to configure anything. Oh and since this is against APTs my work might be useful for messaging: https://github.com/maqp/tfc https://github.com/maqp/tfc It's as close to NSA-proof you can get. Naturally, if the government parks their flower van across the street and grabs your keyboard cable's spurious radio waves* or installs a cam in your house you're SoL, but otherwise you should be pretty good. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)
- ementally 2y ago
  >basically Tor Browser with the VPN instead of Tor-gateway. You don't need a Mullvad VPN for it work, you can use it without Mullvad VPN or any VPN at all.
  - maqp 2y ago
    Oh interesting, thanks for letting me know!
zahlman 2y ago
> Tails/Whonix/Qubes/Heads/BSDs... Mullvad, NetGuard(Android) I don't even know what kind of things these are... ?
- salawat 2y ago
  Tails is an immutable distribution of Linux that runs entirely out of RAM, persisting nothing to long term disks. Typically used in a LiveCD like manner. https://tails.net/ https://tails.net/ Heads similar. https://heads.dyne.org/ https://heads.dyne.org/ Qubes is an OS endeavoring to isolate literally everything conceivable from each other. https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/ BSD is a kernel specifically focused, iiuc, on being as secure and straightforward as possible. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD Whonix seems to be focused around decreasing online or browser based metadata leakage? Mullvad is a paid VPN service. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whonix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whonix Calyx/Pure/GrapheneOS Apparently security focused Android distros. KeePassXC, password manager, self hosted. TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt: Encrypted volume management. Bitwarden, FDE solution iirc. Notably no mention of Wireguard, managing your firewalls/routers/network architecture, IDS's/Intrusion response plans, key hygiene, and focusing on getting end users prepped for the infosec environment; noting that an ineffective infosec engagement with end users completely undermines everything you're trying to work for. Trying to go all in on most of those tools is a recipe for disaster for any org that actually has something else to do other than jumping through endless security hoops. Tools aren't the be all end all. Educated and invested users are.
  - embeng4096 2y ago
    Just adding a small correction: you might be thinking of Bitlocker for FDE -- Bitwarden is a password manager. Thanks for the details on the other stuff, I didn't know what Whonix and Heads were
  - astrange 2y ago
    > BSD is a kernel specifically focused, iiuc, on being as secure and straightforward as possible. No it is not, or at least it doesn't use any modern tools or make a serious attempt to do so. It's a family of OSes written by the kind of people who think if you grow a beard and stare very hard at your C code it will become secure and bug free. It does change slowly, which is a good technique for avoiding introducing bugs, but it's barely heard of techniques like regression testing. The secure one in particular has a lot of mitigations that especially feel like they just dreamed up what they think a security mitigation is, instead of engaging with research.
ignoramous 2y ago
> NetGuard(Android) GrapheneOS warns of NetGuard leaking connections: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/8330-app-compatibility-with-grapheneos/68 https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/8330-app-compatibility-with...

mmh0000 2y ago

If your adversary is someone who can … quite literally … send ninjas in attack helicopters at you. You’re probably going to lose.

upofadown 2y ago
The idea is to prevent them from developing a motivation to do that by keeping them out of your business in the first place.
- mmh0000 2y ago
  I get the motivation. But good luck keeping an organization out of anything you care about when they can: . Legally kill you . Legally compel corporations to embed backdoors . Legally seize all your equipment . Throw away millions of dollars pursing “petty” crimes. Technical means of defending against something like the NSA is, in my opinion, a lost cause. I believe the way to deal with this is by being politically active. Getting people engaged and limiting the powers of these organizations.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    Becoming politically active is one of the fastest ways to get "legally killed," in countries where that actually happens...
    - paretoer 2y ago
      Totally agree. I would think part of a good defense is to simply not care about politics on any level. Personally, I think all these counter measures are a fool's game. It most likely ends up being a form of self labeling as a person to look into. My defense is to be a boring person, not trying to hide anything, lost in a sea of noise.
  - adolph 2y ago
    > Getting people engaged and limiting the powers of these organizations. My impression is that most people want more government; thus, getting more people engaged will lead to increasing the powers of these organizations.

LennyHenrysNuts 2y ago

What do people think of SimpleX? https://simplex.chat/ https://simplex.chat/

maqp 2y ago
There's a LOT of SimpleX shilling lately on HN. tldr, it's snake oil. The company lies about its system being able act as a server without knowing anything about the users. The SimpleX clients don't route via Tor so the server will by definition know the IP addresses of the conversing parties. SimpleX claims to be the most metadata secure app, yet it fails to address the first issue of hiding IP addresses. Also a server has access to each IP addresses' social graph when they see to which target IPs they are forwarding packets. So much for metadata-free.
- epoberezkin 2y ago
  Either you didn't understand the design, or this is not genuine criticism. Every server that user connects to of course knows IP address of the user, be it Tor relay, VPN provider, Nym node, or SimpleX relay - the user chooses which server to trust. Neither of the approaches guarantees transport anonymity. Recently added private message routing protects IP addresses of the users from the destination servers: https://simplex.chat/blog/20240604-simplex-chat-v5.8-private-message-routing-chat-themes.html https://simplex.chat/blog/20240604-simplex-chat-v5.8-private... , which was #1 point of criticism that IP addresses are not protected by default.
  - maqp 2y ago
    Lol that article says >We believe that Tor may be the wrong solution for some users for one of the reasons: much higher latency, error rate and resource usage. Yet you provide no options for Tor, as in https://simplex.chat/docs/server.html https://simplex.chat/docs/server.html your idea for anonymizing users is... For the user to hop through roughly 20 page document of dozens of commands to create the equivalent of personal VPN server, and amidst it, to connect anonymously to contacts' servers, you need to install... Tor https://simplex.chat/docs/server.html#tor-installation-and-configuration https://simplex.chat/docs/server.html#tor-installation-and-c... So if you don't have any options for Tor, maybe you should just default to Tor. As for the hoops, you know, you can just write an install script for the user to auto-configure this stuff correctly. In its current state it's definitely something an average Joe is going to do. If this is there just to shut down criticism, maybe you should instead address the criticism, and make it metadata-private by default, without these insane hoops. If it doesn't get to the point of anonymity by copying a one-liner that runs an install script, i.e. if it's not on par with sudo apt install simplex, it's not going to catch on. Also, your technical documentation how this stuff actually works has 404 issues https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplexmq/blob/stable/rfcs/2023-09-12-second-relays.md https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplexmq/blob/stable/rfcs/2...

jokoon 2y ago

I don't see why one would try to protect himself from the NSA. I understand privacy from my neighbor and criminals. But I want the government to spy on potential criminals. I trust the courts and the process. If you don't, you're just paranoid.

hulitu 2y ago
> But I want the government to spy on potential criminals. > I trust the courts and the process. Good luck then. You _will_ need it.
- jokoon 2y ago
  Seriously, what are you so afraid of? We don't live in China or Russia, what matters is political culture, not hiding from the government. What is the worst that ever happened? Do you think corporations would use the NSA to influence the government? Or do you think the NSA would become a shadow government? I understand the fear of 1984, but 1984 described China and Russia, not the US. Assange and Snowden might sound like heroes to you, but to me they are not.
  - asudosandwich 2y ago
    Right on. People complained about the camera in my bathroom so I told them the same thing. If you’ve done nothing wrong you should have nothing to hide.
  - mdhb 2y ago
    You aren’t wrong for the most part. HN hive mind has a really bad habit of consistently acting incredibly paranoid while actually doing nothing to actually understand how any of this works either from a legal or technical perspective and then on top of all that they have no understanding of what their actual threat model looks like and anyone who dares to interrupt the paranoia is treated like they are some kind of moron. Honestly it’s like listening to a Q-Anon group in here sometimes.
  - aeonik 2y ago