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SecureDrop
- hadoukenio 12y agoSometime in the near future, I predict that the US will require some form of photo I.D before using an internet kiosk. As usual, the spin will be to protect the children.
- Omniusaspirer 12y agoSouth Korea has pretty much already implemented this with the majority of its major websites requiring their SSN equivalent to register. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_registration_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_registration_number
- zerohm 12y agoThere's always McDonald's, except, you are probably on camera.
- taco_john 12y agoUSA is pretty low on the list of countries I could imagine implementing something like this. Given Russia's, China's, and a large portion of SEA countries' internet censorship track records...
- sspiff 12y agoI'd put the USA pretty high on that list. They've implemented plenty of their take-downs over the past year, and are more capable of introducing something like this than any SEA state.
- untog 12y agoI think many people living in the US are unaware of just how bad the rest of the world has it, sometimes.
- enraged_camel 12y agoThat's not the point at all. The USA claims to be a bastion of democracy and freedom. Therefore it has significantly higher standards to live up to than countries like Russia and China.
- Maakuth 12y agoNo, for your convenience, you only need to identify yourself in the case that you exit the kiosk without using any sort of web service account that can be used to identify you ;)
- blueskin_ 12y agoFortunately, they can't do that for all the open/WEP/WPS wireless APs everywhere.
- rdl 12y agoThey've done a pretty good job of scaring people into securing their APs (which is also a legitimate thing in most cases); just publishing some stories about people having ISP service cut off due to freeloaders doing bad stuff would probably be enough; wouldn't even need to try to prosecute some.
- wwwwwwwwww 12y ago>They've done a pretty good job of scaring people into securing their APs How is this even remotely a bad thing? It's trivial to MITM people on unsecured networks - I can't think of a single consumer router that actually does DHCP snooping to prevent it either.
- nfoz 12y agoI think the technology confuses two things: 1. Encrypted traffic between device and wireless hotspot 2. Restricted access to the wireless hotspot (you need a password or it won't give you service) I want to allow anonymous access, but let the traffic be encrypted. Is there a technical reason why this is not implemented? I'm very sad by the culture (and moreso, the legal necessity) of restricting wireless access. I want to share, and have at times relied on anonymous wifi to help me get home.
- dublinben 12y agoYou can run an access point with all the benefits of WPA2/AES, but make the password really simple. Setting your SSID to "PasswordIsBacon" or just using the same SSID and password is a fairly easy way to share access, without running a completely insecure, unencrypted network.
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- revscat 12y agoI have a better idea. Make it so that some traffic receives higher priority than others, and force content providers to have to pay to play. Then limit competition at the ISP level so that to succeed you have to pay a monopoly to carry your traffic in a timely manner. No need for something as heavy as what you propose.
- MikeTaylor 12y agoGood thing criminals have no way to obtain a fake photo-ID.
- Torgo 12y agoThat's what "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC)" is for: http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/ns_tic.pdf http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/ns_tic.pdf It's a national smartcard identity program that Obama admin has been pushing for a while.
- dewey 12y agoIn case you don't have Tor installed and want to know what it looks like: https://imgur.com/GbwKfuG,D2aWi25,glApNg3 https://imgur.com/GbwKfuG,D2aWi25,glApNg3
- toni 12y agoVery refreshing to see a big, red warning in the screenshot about the fact that Javascript is enabled! Usually you see the same thing when Javascript is disabled, asking you to enable it.
- handsomeransoms 12y ago(SecureDrop dev here) Glad you like it! It's hard to tell people who get excited about fun UX ideas that they can't use JS, but from my experience as a browser security engineer, eliminating JavaScript (and plugins, which the TBB does already) dramatically reduces the browser's (unfortunately enormous) attack surface.
- toni 12y agoAgreed with you completely. Every time a new web app is posted to HN and it doesn't work without enabling Javascript, a small circle of security-conscious people complain about it. The responses from other people are in the lines of: "Are there really people that browse the internet without enabling Javascript in 2014?" "Well, 0.01% of your users have Javascript disabled, you can safely ignore them" "Javascript is an important part of the web, if you have it disabled, you have no right to complain" We need more people like you to advocate secure browsers without using Javascript.
- grrowl 12y agoIn August 2013, the FBI injected a Javascript exploit with a MITM attack to uncloak the real IP addresses of people accessing Silk Road over Tor: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/08/attackers-wield-firefox-exploit-to-uncloak-anonymous-tor-users/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/08/attackers-wield-fire... [edit] Nerdier link with exploit demo: http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/fbi-tor-exploit/ http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/fbi-tor-exploit/
- esonderegger 12y agoIf anyone from WaPo visits here, you've got some typos on that page: "Download and install the Tor browser bundle from Download and install the Tor browser bundle from https://www.torproject.org/" https://www.torproject.org/" should be "Download and install the Tor browser bundle from https://www.torproject.org/" https://www.torproject.org/" "You will be provided with a codename that you will use it to log in to check for replies from The Post." should not have the word "it". Otherwise, great work! I'm really glad that you're doing this and featuring it prominently on your home page.
- lnanek2 12y agoWow, Tor is still a thing? We have confirmation that security agencies have taken over exit nodes and injected spyware before to track targets. I'm surprised anyone uses it. It's like the security lottery.
- icebraining 12y agoExit nodes are irrelevant for hidden services like WaPo's SecureDrop, the connection never leaves the Tor network.
- meowface 12y agoThe NSA leaks reveal that for the most part, Tor is still secure if you're using a sufficient number of intermediary nodes. If anything, the real concern here is the implicit encouragement to use local library computers, which would be much easier for a government agency (or cybercriminal) to infect with malware and observe.
- Create 12y ago“The American Library Association (ALA) opposes any use of governmental power to suppress the free and open exchange of knowledge and information or to intimidate individuals exercising free inquiry…ALA considers that sections of the USA PATRIOT ACT are a present danger to the constitutional rights and privacy rights of library users.” http://www.librarian.net/technicality.html http://www.librarian.net/technicality.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
- handsomeransoms 12y ago(Securedrop dev) That's not an implicit encouragement, despite it being your interpretation. Library computers, in my experience, do not typically allow you to install software on them, such as the Tor Browser Bundle, which is needed to access SecureDrop. The explicit encouragement that is clearly written on the landing page is to use a personal computer (not a work computer) and a public network (e.g. a coffee shop).
- 12y ago
- noso 12y agoThe Guardian has also released a secure drop platform: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/05/guardian-launches-securedrop-whistleblowers-documents http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/05/guardian-l... https://securedrop.theguardian.com/ https://securedrop.theguardian.com/
- pcl 12y agoThis is a different deployment of the same product [1]. Which, incidentally, was originally created by Aaron Swartz. The Wikipedia page[2] has a list of well-known deployments. [1] https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SecureDrop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SecureDrop
- aroman 12y agoThanks for pointing that out. I just watched "The Internet's Own Boy", the documentary about Aaron, and it is positively incredibly how many projects Aaron created or played a critical role in creating. An unthinkable shame that he left us so soon — one can only imagine all the things he had left to create.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- noso 12y agoThanks for posting the links, I am guessing the deployment list will grow.
- dan_bk 12y agoIf you depend on your anonymity, do not use Tor.
- blauwbilgorgel 12y agoDoes anyone know what the codenames are like? If they are easy enough to remember, then they may be easy enough to brute-force? I think this is a great concept, yet perhaps too little, too late (Journalists should know PGP and drop boxes like these should have been common already). I also worry a bit because of Washington Post's track record with leaks, of the top of my head: - Washington Post was Snowden's first choice, but they put up enough demands for Snowden to move to The Guardian. [1] - Washington Post, according to Assange, had access to the "Collateral Murder" video a whole year before WikiLeaks published their edited video. [2] - Washington Post employs op-ed columnists that call for assassination of "criminally dangerous" leakers like Assange [3] [1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/nsa-leaker-shopped-his-story-around.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/nsa-leaker-shop... [2] http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2010/s3040234.htm http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2010/s3040234.htm [3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/02/AR2010080202627.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08... EDIT: More information on SecureDrop: https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop and source here: https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop
- jacorreia 12y agoYour codename seems to be a collection of random words, the number of which you get to specify.
- gabemart 12y ago> Does anyone know what the codenames are like? If they are easy enough to remember, then they may be easy enough to brute-force? I don't know what they're like, but if you take a list of 5000 common words and use 4 random entries for each codename, there are 625,000,000,000,000 possible combinations. Brute-forcing the entire space at 100,000 tries per second would take ~200 years. Edit: I made a toy jsfiddle version: http://jsfiddle.net/SwWZ9/10/ http://jsfiddle.net/SwWZ9/10/ The wordlist is just a random sampling of English nouns (I couldn't find a quick source of common nouns long enough). It may contain profanity, watch out!
- 13throwaway 12y ago
- FiloSottile 12y agoIf the leaker visits this page before opening the Tor Browser from a regular browser to copy the onion url, the whole thing is as safe as SSL as there will be a trail of the SSL connection just before the visit to SecureDrop. And they don't even explain to avoid it. OPSEC is hard.
- cik 12y agoThere's this hard tradeoff that most people are willing to make, between making things more 'secure' and making things useable by the general public. I just wish that attention would be paid to the security side of things. Ultimately, we can write descriptive documentation - but getting it read and understood is hard. Cryptoparties, are again a great idea, but getting the non-technical user involved is damned hard. IMHO these things always come down to "how do we make it easy for the public, whilst keeping it REALLY secure". How does security become a general piece of education, much akin to math, or at least history?
- icebraining 12y agoI don't think SecureDrop is designed to be usable by the general public.
- cik 12y agoI'm happy to agree with you. Equally I feel that with a (small) amount of love, it could be used by whistleblowers! To me it's almost ready for that.
- glomph 12y agoOnly if they visit the page just before. Seems plausible they would read about it, set it up and then drop their documents at a later date as a default behavior. I agree it would probably be a good idea to put a warning about such a problem though.
- giarc 12y agoThat's like saying John Smith went to a bank withdrew money at 1pm on Jan 1. Then the bank was robbed at 1:10 Jan 1 therefore John Smith robbed the bank. I don't think you can connect visiting the info page and the very next SecureDrop file upload.
- peterwwillis 12y agoTor hidden services are not bulletproof. Just as a really simple example, you can do network traffic analysis to find network nodes with one-way traffic to hosts without a correlated public service and deduce if a hidden service is nearby. There are several exploits which have been used in the past to expose Tor hidden services, and several papers on theoretical ways to expose them. Many of these attacks can be used in reverse to expose the origin of a connection to a hidden service. In the [not so] extreme case, the govt can always issue a National Security Letter to WaPo and scoop up any data it wants directly from the hidden service servers, similar to its Silk Road and Freedom Hosting takedowns. The FBI TOR Exploit [ http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/fbi-tor-exploit/ http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/fbi-tor-exploit/ ] Heartbleed used to reveal Tor hidden services [ https://blog.torproject.org/blog/openssl-bug-cve-2014-0160/ https://blog.torproject.org/blog/openssl-bug-cve-2014-0160/ ] Hot or Not: Revealing hidden services by their clock skew [ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/ccs06hotornot.pdf http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/ccs06hotornot.pdf ] Tor Hidden Service Passive De-Cloaking [ http://blog.whitehatsec.com/tor-hidden-service-passive-de-cloaking/ http://blog.whitehatsec.com/tor-hidden-service-passive-de-cl... ]
- hackuser 12y agoI worry that the Washington Post has unintentionally created a honeypot for leakers. I wonder if the Post has the resources to sufficiently secure it: The requirement for security is to make successful attacks more expensive than they are worth for the attackers. (There is no perfect security, of course.) How much is information leaked to the WP worth? It's information that can change the course of history; it could make war or peace; it could be worth billions or even trillions of dollars; it could simply change the course of the stock market or of one stock and be worth billions to an individual. If I ran a state intelligence service, with the fate of my nation and all my citizens in my hands, I would be irresponsible not to invest in monitoring the Washington Post (and the NY Times, and others') "secure" tip line. If I ran an unscrupulous business, it would be worth it, if only for the information relevant to the stock market. EDIT: Also, the information can change the course of elections and be a target of unscrupulous politicians. I find it hard to believe that the Washington Post or any news organization has the resources to protect assets that valuable.
- DustinCalim 12y agoThis is brilliant, and a smart move for the WP, despite some of the criticism's below. I think it's a much needed, if romantic, idea that harkens back to the transparency of Wikileaks, and gives WP a great little heads up over some of the other papers. I wouldn't be surprised to watch the others follow suit soon.
- tlrobinson 12y agoRandom question: has anyone attempted to build a Tor-like system (or bridge to the actual Tor network) using WebRTC? Assuming you were able to avoid the "JavaScript crypto problem", would this be a good or bad idea?
- angry_octet 12y agoIf all Post correspondents used SecureDrop to submit their stories that would be a start. One would have to assume that all the traffic going to the server is logged by the NSA and anyone else who can manage it. If the traffic volume is low then timing correlation with even a large pool of suspects is simple. An active attacker can differentiate between the SSL connection from a web browser and one from a tor node, so the background SSL traffic to the Post would not provide cover. I think it could be improved by using a mix network (eg mixminion) accessed over tor, rather than just tor. Unfortunately the mixmaster/mixminion networks are currently too small to provide meaningful complexity. Large scale adoption by, eg, newspapers, is not technically hard and would significantly complicate the adversary problem. I'd love to see more discussion of bitmessage and Pond (https://pond.imperialviolet.org/ https://pond.imperialviolet.org/) cf http://www.syverson.org/ http://www.syverson.org/