I've been working through the technical elements of the anonabox setup. I'll leave the moral outrage to others, personally I think $50 for anonymity with tor is

I've been working through the technical elements of the anonabox setup. I'll leave the moral outrage to others, personally I think $50 for anonymity with tor is great but impossible. Currently I'm (somewhat hilariously) trying to reverse engineer the firmware in an open source operating system to a product described as 100% open source, but here's what I have so far: The source shipped so far is a bunch of config files that appear to be hand-loaded onto devices running an existing image according to a forum post[1]. You would expect to see a firmware image built using OpenWRT the imagebuilder or complete toolchain with some degree of code audit if you want to promise no backdoors. The firewall configuration uses both OpenWRT's UCI and a separate unintegrated iptables script. The configuration means that the device will leak protocols other than TCP and UDP with specific destination ports out through the wan interface onto the other network or the Internet. There's a hard coded root password in the build. OpenWRT doesn't have one and asks you to set your own. The lan side wifi is completely open and unencrypted. If you were to use this device thinking you're safe, anyone can sniff what you're doing if they're within wireless range before it goes through Tor. Because Tor provides transport encryption, almost all .onion sites use HTTP. The device exposes port 9040 on all interfaces, this is the tor socks port. I don't yet know whether this could be used to get to the lan side network (e.g. 127.0.0.1 HTTP interface) from tor as I haven't looked into it yet by chaining proxies as I haven't had time, but I don't think it's needed. There's hard-coded host key material, the startup entropy state is unknown - basically lots of potential crypto problems that to be honest can be saved until we see actual thing and it's code. From the config files it looks like the hardware uses kernel modules that load firmware in binary blob form from the device's flash memory. This is common in routers and makes kernel upgrades difficult because the blobs are designed for specific kernel versions. The source code for the device's OS is not available. There's an upgrade firmware available but looking at the firmware using various extraction and carving tools yielded nothing. Some initial analysis shows that there's a prologue and a higher entropy possibly compressed or encrypted component. This is not an open hardware platform. Without some serious modifications the device will almost certainly suffer from a transparent proxy leak problem[2]. In conclusion the technical claims don't match what has been provided at this stage. I'd be quite happy to discuss things with the developers, but fundamentally this project is not going to deliver the anonymity customers have been told they will even if the security problems are fixed and the source for everything is opened up. I'm a bit disheartened that they're taking the money and going to ship, but I accept that it's hard to turn down half a million dollars. [1] - http://www.torouter.com/developer/showthread.php?tid=4 http://www.torouter.com/developer/showthread.php?tid=4 [2] - https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TransparentProxyLeaks https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Transparen...