Tagged: security
What I’m Using for Privacy
In the past weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about online privacy. I’ve been setting up a new Mac (a Hackintosh, to be precise) which means that I’ve been installing my day-to-day software. Many of these programs are ones that I’ve chosen over the years specifically to enhance my online privacy and aren’t ‘stock’ applications.
Over the next few posts I’ll go over each piece of my privacy puzzle and explain why I chose it over the standard applications. As a collection I think that they represent a pretty good start at locking down my online presence, and you might find my thought process useful. I’m also open to constructive criticism…if you think I’ve missed something, let me know.
I’ll list what I’m using in the following table and and provide links to the individual articles explaining my choices as they are written.
| Category | What I use | Instead of |
| Thunderbird | Apple Mail, GMail etc | |
| IM | Signal | Anything |
| Cloud | SeaFile | Any commercial service |
| Cell / voice calls | Facetime | Just dialing a number |
| Encryption | PGP | Not encrypting |
| Web search | DuckDuckGo | |
| Browser | Tor Bundle | Safari |
| Operating system | MacOS | Windows |
It’s time to get serious about personal privacy
Today as I was driving my dog, Maggie, to the park for her afternoon walk, a pickup truck pulled up behind me at a stop light. I wouldn't normally think twice about the car behind me, but this one had a very obvious Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) mounted on the dash, and I could see the driver behind me fiddling with it. My assumption was that he was either enabling it or saving a capture of my plate.
If you don't know what an ALPR looks like, the next time you see a BU Parking Services truck go by, look for two rectangular devices mounted to the roof, one on each side. At BU they are used to ferret out cars that are parked in lots where they shouldn't be...the truck drives up and down the rows, scanning plates, comparing them to the Parking Services database of pass holders.
I've lived in my town for going on a decade now, and I'm familiar with the law enforcement vehicles in use here. This wasn't one of them, and there were no markings to indicate that it might be from another town or perhaps a state vehicle. My take was that it was a private vehicle.
Why was this person reading my plate?
I have a Johnson/Weld sticker on the back of my car. My very first thought was that someone wanted to know who I am, maybe because of my political affiliation.
I understand that this sounds like a paranoid conclusion. However, consider two points:
- Under the Obama administration, the power wielded by the NSA, FBI, and CIA have grown to unprecedented levels. Ed Snowden revealed a small part of the domestic surveillance being undertaken by these agencies, and they made headlines for about one week. Afterward the country moved on to who was winning Dancing With the Stars. Our government is intercepting every email, text message, and phone call made in this country. Eavesdropping warrants and gross violations of our privacy are approved by a secret court. We are murdering innocent people by silent drone attack in sovereign nations on a regular basis. As a country we just don't seem to care.
- The incoming Trump administration does not appear to be pro-privacy. In fact, they seem quite the opposite. Donald Trump is being handed a domestic surveillance capability unsurpassed by any government and I believe that he will use it to its fullest extent. Worse, a naive, unskilled Trump administration combined with our current public apathy is the perfect environment for our intelligence agencies to aggressively attempt to expand their reach.
In this environment, an active ALPR mounted in an unmarked vehicle recording my plate is a threat.
The question is, then, what to do? To this point privacy advocates have encouraged us to secure our email, and chat, and voice messages, but with the caveat that yes, it's not always easy, and yes, this is how you should do it but we understand that you probably can't because it's too hard.
It's different now.
I've always assumed that my emails, my phone calls, and the web sites I visit are recorded. Not because I'm someone that needs to be watched ... it's just that I understand, based on the evidence I've seen, that everyone's information is being recorded. I've advocated for privacy while personally falling short -- I've fallen victim to the 'too hard' argument, and to the idea that my small voice will be lost in the cacophony of an entire country's worth of data.
It's different now.
I can only be responsible for myself. Encryption is now my default. I've encrypted the disks on my computers, and all of the backups. I'm actively encouraging everyone that I regularly message with to switch to Signal, which encrypts text messaging end-to-end. I've migrated from Apple Mail to Thunderbird because the latter better incorporates email encryption. I've switched my default search service from Google to DuckDuckGo because the latter promises to not store my online search history and is secured with HTTPS. My voice calls are made using Facetime rather than the standard cell phone connection because Facetime is encrypted end-to-end. I find myself using Tor more and more often (even as I acknowledge its shortcomings).
Even though I have nothing to hide, I am hiding everything.
It's different now.
If you need help securing your personal communications, I am happy to help. You can reach me at perryd@bu.edu; if you are able, please encrypt your email. If you aren't able, I can help with that, too.
Which VPN Should I use?
Recently one of my students asked for a recommendation on a VPN app for his Macbook. I thought my rather long-winded reply might be useful to others wondering the same thing, and it's appended below.
There are two primary use cases for a VPN:
- You are away from your home network, possibly on an unsecured network such as in a café or an airport, and want to encrypt all of the network traffic coming to and from your computer (even traffic that isn't normally encrypted)
- You want to appear to be somewhere else in the world. I ran into this when I wanted to watch World Cup soccer matches not shown in the US but available in the UK; I set up a VPN connection to a server in London so that it appeared I was in that city, and then watched the games on the BBC.
Here's my reply to my student's question:
The short answer is that I don’t trust the apps on the App Store for VPNs. The longer reason…all of them provide their own server to connect to, which means that my VPN internet traffic is going through an endpoint that I don’t control. The only assurance I have that my traffic isn’t being decrypted, stored, or otherwise manipulated is that the app seller tells me that they don’t. Also, the programs are not open source, so I can’t look through the code to assure myself that there is no back door or other security risk.
For that reason, I use Tunnelblick on the Mac (https://tunnelblick.net), which is an open-source VPN program. I have very high confidence that it hasn’t been compromised. I run my own VPN server (which I personally built and maintain) to connect Tunnelblick to when I’m away from the home network, so the encrypted tunnel goes from my Macbook, through the Tunnelblick VPN, into my own server, and from there out onto the internet. The use case is typically that I’m away from home, on an insecure network, and want to lock down / encrypt everything going over that network.
That being said, if my purpose is to connect to a VPN so that it appears I am somewhere else, such as if I want my internet address to be in the UK to watch soccer, I’m forced to use one of the commercial VPN providers, and for that I use Tunnelbear, https://www.tunnelbear.com. Note that this is not open-source, and so your confidence in it in terms of privacy should be very low. They do get good reviews, and I’ve had a $5/month subscription with them for about three years now. I generally use Tunnelbear for very specific purposes (such as location shifting) and take steps to make sure that no other traffic is going through their VPN endpoint (I use Little Snitch firewall rules to accomplish this).
On the iPhone/iPad side I use OpenVPN (https://openvpn.net), but again I’m connecting back to my on VPN server with it. It’s an open-source project that I have high confidence in.
OpenVPN offers PrivateTunnel, with a pay-as-you-go connection plan that is fairly inexpensive. It’s the same team that produces OpenVPN, so I would trust them a little more. The ‘tunnel’ is a VPN connection back to one of their servers, and so you run the same risk of interception as with something like TunnelBear, which means that you would NOT use this solution for highly sensitive traffic. Also, I don’t believe that they have all that many servers, so you’d be limited in your choice of where you appear to be. I’ve been meaning to give them a try to see what the service looks like.
[update 7/15/2016] I've installed Private Tunnel for testing. They offer endpoints in: NYC; Chicago; Miami; San Jose; Montreal; London; Amsterdam; Stockholm; Frankfurt; Tokyo; Zurich; and Hong Kong.
I know that’s a long answer! Bottom line is that if you are connecting to someone else’s VPN server, don’t trust it with anything other than mundane traffic. For location-shifting to do something trivial like watch soccer or get around a school’s firewall, commercial solutions like TunnelBear are fine.
Since we’re on the subject, I can’t recall if I mentioned it in class, but if you need secure IM and voice, you (currently) should be using Signal and nothing else. And of course PGP for email :^)
