An easy and secure way for anonymous internet usage:
To start using the internet anonymously you just have to start both VMs Tor gateway VM and Tor workstation VM. As soon as they they finished booting, you can use the anonymous internet access through the Tor workstation. If you want to stop using the internet anonymously, just power down both VMs.
The goal of this article is to provide a solution to use the internet anonymously in an easy and secure way. Anonymous as in no one but you must be able to tell that you are communication with a certain receiver (like browsing a website: No one must know that you are surfing that certain website). A way to use the internet anonymously is to use an internet connection that can not be tracked down to your person and a computer that has no information stored about you. Which means quite an effort every single time you want to use the internet anonymously. For an internet connection that can not be tracked down to your person, software like Tor has been developed to accomplish this also over a non-anonymous internet connection. Checking if the computer has no information stored about you, can not be handled by the Tor software and must be handled by the user! Currently there is one major problem if you want to use the internet anonymously: You really do have to understand the functioning of computer networks and the Tor software to a degree that is far away from being trivial – otherwise you might probably use the software in an insecure way. Let me give you some examples:
Which is why I want to discuss a new approach that is at least as secure as the last one above (#3) but additionally should be quite easy to use:
To start using the internet anonymously you just have to start both VMs Tor gateway VM and Tor workstation VM. As soon as they finished booting, you can use the anonymous internet access through the Tor workstation. If you want to stop using the internet anonymously, just power down both VMs. The task of routing traffic through the Tor network has been moved to the Tor gateway VM. So you do not have to modify your local system any more then installing Virtualbox and importing both VMs. You do have a preconfigured Tor workstation ready to use that boots within a minute and you can be sure to anonymously use the internet. The Tor gateway runs OpenWRT Linux using just about 8Mb of disk space and 32Mb of RAM. It boots in less then 3 seconds and transparently routes all traffic generated within the Tor gateway itself and every traffic coming on the virtual internal interface “tor” through the Tor network. You do not need to do anything but start when you want to use Tor and stop the VM when you finished. The Tor workstation runs Micro Core Linux using about 120Mb of disk space and 192Mb of RAM. It boots in less then a minute and has some browsers (Firefox, Chromium and Opera) and a terminal installed. It only stores information within a session. So if you shut it down and boot it again it does not have any information about the previous session. Of course you are not forced to use the Tor workstation. You can use any other VM (Linux, Windows, AmigaOS, just any TCP/IP capable Operating System). Just configure the network settings of the VM (in Virtualbox Settings->Network->Adapter attached to internal network “tor”). Please report, if you encounter any unwanted behavior or find any problems! Also do so if you have got any suggestions to improve the VMs or this approach as a whole. Side note: The content of the communication between you (Tor workstation VM) and any receiver (e.g. a website) is necessarily only encrypted within the Tor network. So if you open an unencrypted connection to any receiver the Tor exit node which in fact opens the connection to the receiver is able to see the content of the connection. So do not send any sensible information like passwords over unencrypted connections!
Information for developers
There is a git repository available for building the Tor gateway image from scratch. Feedback and patches are welcome.
To use the fast gateway you need to change the internal network of workstation VM to “torfast”.
]]>Each of these setups has different disadvantages and neither fits my requirements:
One solution might be to transparently route a VM through the TOR network so that a VM does not need to be modified in any way. It is quite simple and should work on all OS although I just tried it on a Linux host. As already said, the VM can run any OS!
The host must to redirect all TCP packets to a transparent SOCKS proxy which itself forwards the packets to a TOR client. UDP packets with destination port 53 are redirected to a small script which puts the payload into a TCP packet and forwards it to a TOR client. This is necessary because TOR itself can only handle TCP packets. The host must drop all other packets coming from the VM.
How this works under a Linux host:
iptables -A OUTPUT -t nat -p tcp -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j REDIRECT –to-ports 31337
iptables -A OUTPUT -t nat -p udp –dport 53 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j REDIRECT –to-ports 1253
iptables -A OUTPUT -d 127.0.0.1/32 -p tcp -m tcp –dport 31337 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -d 127.0.0.1/32 -p udp -m udp –dport 1253 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j LOG
iptables -A OUTPUT -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j DROP
iptables -A OUTPUT -t nat -d 127.0.0.1/32 -p tcp -m tcp –dport 445 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j RETURN
iptables -A OUTPUT -t nat -d 127.0.0.1/32 -p tcp -m tcp –dport 139 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j RETURN
iptables -A OUTPUT -d 127.0.0.1/32 -p udp -m udp –dport 137 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -d 127.0.0.1/32 -p tcp -m tcp –dport 445 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -d 127.0.0.1/32 -p tcp -m tcp –dport 139 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j ACCEPT
So I decided to write a small script which is executed from the context menu of konqueror or dolphin (kde file browsers). It compresses a file or directory, sets a password and uploads it to filefactory.com .
]]>I think got used to that feature with the previous mail client I used: thunderbird and I am wondering if the mail client I used before thunderbird (mutt) has a similar feature.
]]>Update:
New URL: git://github.com/ra–/ra-gentoo-overlay.git
Browse online: http://github.com/ra–/ra-gentoo-overlay/tree/master
The new version in the 2.6.25 linux kernel works quite well for me (the one in 2.6.24 did not), but the wlan led is not working. This patch makes it work (I removed the support for the 4965 chip since I don’t need it. If you need it: this is the source to the patch).
]]>If you have no clue what this is all about here are two screenshots [1] [2] (actually these do not represent the patch exactly, but you should get the idea).
The kde split ebuild for ksmserver: ebuild (I will do the update to the kde-all-in-one ebuild on request).
To make use of the feature emerge with USE=”dbus hal”. If you don’t see any icons next to the suspend/hibernate buttons, make sure you use an icon set that provides the files “suspend.png” and “hibernate.png”.
]]>There are just two things I found in the software:
The kde submenu text in pdfnup.desktop “X-KDE-Submenu=Paginate” is not
very clear. “X-KDE-Submenu=Pages per sheet” would be better imho.
A small bug in pdfjoin.desktop makes it always display the italian kde
submenu: “X-KDE-Submenu=Unisci o aggiungi” should be replaced by
“X-KDE-Submenu[it]=Unisci o aggiungi”.
I just wrote the author Giuseppe Benigno an email, so these “bugs” probably get fixed soon.
]]>You can specifiy a trusted directory and a group as “trusted” or “untrusted”.
If the group is untrusted all users belonging to this group will only be able to execute files from the trusted directory. If the group is trusted all users will only be able to execute files from the trusted directory but users belonging to the group (and root of course).
Get it here: linux-2.6.18-tpe_restriction (patch, 5 KB)
The patch is based on grsecurity – so credits go to Brad Spengler.
]]>Both patches are based on grsecurity – so credits go to Brad Spengler.
]]>Source: http://kerneltrap.org/node/8476
]]>Da wären Erfahrungsberichte sehr interessant. (:
]]>Source: http://kerneltrap.org/node/8207
]]>As you can see, I do prefer a kernel without modules. (:
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