secure-internet.org

Our last Lawful Interception Report was published Friday, May 21. 2010. Time for an update. Here's the report:

Due to uncertainty of JonDonym Users about possibly lawful interception on JonDonym cascades we hereby publish the following report. The report includes the period between May 21, 2010 and today (November 7, 2010). The report only includes inquiries regarding our own JonDonym Mixes, not mixes of other mix operators:

Secure Internet Mix Name	Mix Type	inquiries	declined	carried out
SecureInternet(1)	Premium Exit	0	0	0
SecureInternet2	Test Mix for JonDos	0	0	0
SecureInternet3	Premium Exit	0	0	0
SecureInternet4	Premium Exit	0	0	0
SecureInternet5	Free Exit	0	0	0
SecureInternet6	Free Exit	0	0	0
SecureInternet7	Premium Exit	0	0	0
SecureInternet8	Premium Middle	0	0	0
TOTAL		0	0	0

To provide precise information on the preconditions of successful lawful interception measures on JonDonym cascades:

• We must get forced by the authorities of Switzerland and/or the mix locations state
• Without legal enforcement we never will enable interception as it then wasn't lawful (inquiries would get declined by us)
• ALL of the other mix operators in the mix cascade in question TOO must get forced by the authorities in their state
  (if only two of three mix operators carry out a lawful interception measure, no successful interception regarding full user traffic is possible).

To summarize the report:

• We were never asked by any party from any state to carry out any interception meassure
• Therefor, there was no need to decline any inquiry
• Therefor, no interception measure was ever carried out

Also, we have never heard of any interception inquiry from our Mix Cascade partners:

Delta-Protect Ltd., Great Britain

Regarding Mixes, run by german operators, we've already published an information on the Mix Operators Blog
at http://www.mix-proxy-servers.org

The USENIX group and the SAGE group, both traditional organizations from the UNIX world and with proven track record, worked out a declaration for the "System Administrators Code of Ethics". This declaration includes a helpful set of rules to which system administrators can declare their own commitment.

System administrators usually have a powerful position in the companies they work for. in usual environments, only laws and company policies regulate administrators work. Thus, there is a lack of regulation regarding the ethics of running computers as company policies and laws often do not consider advanced requirements required by ethical standards.

For this reason, we declare our commitment:

"We as professional System Administrators do hereby commit ourselves to the highest standards of ethical and professional conduct, and agree to be guided by this code of ethics, and encourage every System Administrator to do the same."

The SAGE set of rules is available at http://www.sage.org/ethics/

Just a few minutess ago we brought a brandnew firewall ruleset for all of our servers in effect.

The new ruleset includes:

• Anti Spoofing Protection
• SYN Flood Protection against DDoS Attacks
  (DDoS = Distributed Denial of Service Attacks)
• Improved Protection against any sort of Brute Force Attacks
• Enhanced Logging of any type of Attack

The firewall we always use is the PF packet filter from the OpenBSD project which is well recognized as the most secure Unix/Linux derivate.

In very rare cases some of the users of our services might have felt a short service interruption but in general things went nice and smoothly.

Happy Weekend !

Staff at SecureInternet is excited about Manuel Saez' Daybed Chair.

Manuel Saez, argentinean industrial designer from New York City with a strong background in ergonomics, has won more than sixty design awards. His best known creation is the Daybed Chair.

The chair has a comfortable seating posture, cushions to make it extra mushy and the perfect stand, which holds your laptop with ease. It was created after watching screen workers, constantly complaing about backache and so it ensures a relaxed working position for those, spending their life in front of computer screens. As a side effect, improved relaxation also leads to better work results when programmers may more easily follow their 'flow' - they say.

But there are even more screen worker products from Saez.

Continue reading "Staff excited about Manuel Saez' Daybed Chair..." »

Most people using the internet do not know:

All computers connected to the internet constantly are under attack - at least from script kids, trying to penetrate and capture another individuals or organizations computer systems to abuse them for sending out SPAM or incorporate the system into a bot net, capable i.e. to run Distributed Denial of Service Attacks.

Overtaking computers from remote locations, especially servers with fast uplinks and huge resources, is a business.

Script kids do not really know much about how to crack computers. They only use simple small programs working through tons of computers, testing each of them for vulnerabilities and weak security.

But there are also much more skilled 'black hats' capable to overcome higher hurdles than just standard security measures deployed by the most.

Servers of SecureInternet are no exception here of course. Our servers are attacked too. Due to their critical mission as mix proxy servers within the JonDonym network, our servers even could be seen as an extraordinary target and, as such, attract script kids as well as more advanced crackers. That's why we deploy security measures far above the usual standards. Our servers also have to withstand highly skilled attackers.

Recently, we created some statistics on the penetration attempts run against our mix proxy server hosts:

Continue reading "Stats on Attacks / Banned IPs on Mix Proxy Servers" »

Just read the FreeBSD Foundation's Announcement on FreeBSD's Jail based Virtualization Infrastructure and Virtual Network Stack.

We just post the announcement here:

Dear FreeBSD Community,

We are pleased to announce that Bjoern A. Zeeb has been awarded a grant to improve FreeBSD's jail based virtualization infrastructure and to continue to work on the virtual network stack. His employer, CK Software GmbH is matching the Foundation's funding with hours.

Continue reading "FreeBSD Virtualization Infrastructure and..." »

The BSD mag started 1-2 years ago. It meanwhile turned out to be a valuable source of knowledge for system administrators, network administrators and other folks from the BSD universe: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and other BSDs.

SecureInternet now considers to contribute some security related articles to the BSD mag

However, the BSD mag is recommended. Free downloads of the PDF version are available.

Their website is available at http://bsdmag.org/.

Google recently published statistics on the numbers of data requests for Google users run by the various governments to uncover users' identities.

Google setup a small website on this issue. The numbers may get sorted by countries and further criteria.

The website is available at http://www.google.com/governmentrequests.

JonDonym Mix Proxy Operators launched their commonly run Blog: http://www.mix-proxy-servers.org The new blog will be the one stop shopping place for JonDonym users to get all information on mix proxy servers, mix cascades, upcoming maintenance, malfunctions and other issues regarding mix proxy server operations.

IT security is a question of trustworthiness. The people at Secure Internet feel, that we owe solid and professional work and a policy of advanced safeguarding to our users when setting up our production servers and services. For this reason we decided to publish at least some of the measures we use to secure our servers (other measures won't get published as publishing everything could ease an attackers work). JonDonym mix proxy servers in general use the following setup (plus additional measures, not mentioned here):

• We in general rely on FreeBSD and its many security options often descending from the TrustedBSD project.
• We always deploy FreeBSD RELEASE - never CURRENT or STABLE. We ensure updates on time.
• We never use operating systems preinstalled by data center staff. We always setup the servers from scratch using KVM and double checked ISO images.
• All hosts get secured using FreeBSD security level kernel settings.
• We always use FreeBSDs Port Audit mechanism to watch out for vulnerablilties of ports.
• All hard disk partitions dedicated to applications are always encrypted using AES. All encrypted partitions are secured by pass phrases and additional keyfiles.
• Additionally, all hosts SWAP partitions are always encrypted using AES.
• The /tmp directory is always a memory disk to avoid application data being left on an unencrypted partition after shutdown. As also the SWAP partitions are encrypted (mentioned already above) no application data can get accessed by unauthorized persons.
• All application services always get jailed using FreeBSDs advanced software virtualization method which provides similar isolation to hardware virtualization. No single application service jail has any remote administration daemon running. All application service jails live on different hard disk partitions - each using its own pass phrase and its own keyfile to maximize isolation of the jails from each other.
• All hosts always get secured using the PF packet filter from the OpenBSD project as firewall. Firewall rulesets constantly get tested, improved and tightened.
• Remote administration access for our administrators is secured by three layers of access restriction.
• All workstations of Secure Internet are secured using the same rules as described here.
• Internal organization of server administration follows strict rules on who may access which host by which measures. Administrator credentials are stored on secure storages, too secured by these rules plus two additional layers.
• We maintain written documents on all security measures.
• We use a couple of solid monitoring tools for both purposes - watching vital server and services functions as well as intrusion detection.

The measures above secure the servers against two types of intruders:

• Data center staff, trying to access any data on the hosts by physical access. Data center staff might switch off and reboot the servers but the won't be able to see any application data.
• Attackers, trying to access the hosts via the internet. Through the extensive measures described above, black hats would have a pretty hard time trying to be successful. We can't guarantee that there will never be any exploit available, but we do everything to be serious about security.

Even this might be seen as a questionable statement by some, we can assure, that we never found any intruder or unauthorized data access on one of our servers. In case we were cracked one day, we won't hesitate to publish a report on this.

Due to uncertainty of JonDonym Users about possibly lawful interception on JonDonym cascades we today publish the following report. The report includes the period between July 18, 2008 and May 21, 2010. It only includes inquiries regarding our own JonDonym Mixes:

Secure Internet Mix Name	Mix Type	inquiries	declined	carried out
SecureInternet(1)	Premium Exit	0	0	0
SecureInternet2	Test Mix for JonDos	0	0	0
SecureInternet3	Premium Exit	0	0	0
SecureInternet4	Premium Exit	0	0	0
SecureInternet5	Free Exit	0	0	0
SecureInternet6	Free Exit	0	0	0
SecureInternet7	Premium Exit	0	0	0
SecureInternet8	Premium Middle	0	0	0
TOTAL		0	0	0

To provide precise information on the preconditions of successful lawful interception measures on JonDonym cascades:

• We must get forced by the authorities of Switzerland and/or the mix locations statey
• Without legal enforcement we never will enable interception as it then wasn't lawful (inquiries would get declined by us)
• ALL of the other mix operators in the mix cascade in question TOO must get forced by the authorities in their state
  (if only two of three mix operators carry out a lawful interception measure, no successful interception is possible).

To summarize the report:

• We were never asked by any party from any state to carry out any interception meassure
• Therefor, there was no need to decline any inquiry
• Therefor, no interception measure was ever carried out

Also, we have never heard of any interception inquiry from our Mix Cascade partners:

• Lexi Pimenidis IT Consulting, Germany
• Martin Behrens Germany
• Delta-Protect Ltd., Great Britain

Published by EFF. Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties group defending your rights in the digital world:

EFF Research Shows More Than 8 in 10 Browsers Have Unique, Trackable Signatures

San Francisco - New research by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has found that an overwhelming majority of web browsers have unique signatures -- creating identifiable "fingerprints" that could be used to track you as you surf the Internet. The findings were the result of an experiment EFF conducted with volunteers who visited http://panopticlick.eff.org/. The website anonymously logged the configuration and version information from each participant's operating system, browser, and browser plug-ins -- information that websites routinely access each time you visit -- and compared that information to a database of configurations collected from almost a million other visitors. EFF found that 84% of the configuration combinations were unique and identifiable, creating unique and identifiable browser "fingerprints." Browsers with Adobe Flash or Java plug-ins installed were 94% unique and trackable.

"We took measures to keep participants in our experiment anonymous, but most sites don't do that," said EFF Senior Staff Technologist Peter Eckersley. "In fact, several companies are already selling products that claim to use browser fingerprinting to help websites identify users and their online activities. This experiment is an important reality check, showing just how powerful these tracking mechanisms are."

EFF found that some browsers were less likely to contain unique configurations, including those that block JavaScript, and some browser plug-ins may be able to be configured to limit the information your browser shares with the websites you visit. But overall, it is very difficult to reconfigure your browser to make it less identifiable. The best solution for web users may be to insist that new privacy protections be built into the browsers themselves.

"Browser fingerprinting is a powerful technique, and fingerprints must be considered alongside cookies and IP addresses when we discuss web privacy and user trackability," said Eckersley. "We hope that browser developers will work to reduce these privacy risks in future versions of their code."

EFF's paper on Panopticlick will be formally presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2010) in Berlin in July.

For the full white paper: How Unique is Your Web Browser?:
https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf

For more details on Pantopticlick:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/every-browser-unique-results-fom-pa...

For more on online behavioral tracking:
http://www.eff.org/issues/online-behavioral-tracking

Contacts: Peter Eckersley Senior Staff Technologist Electronic Frontier Foundation pde@eff.org

The original article was posted at http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2010/05/13

Users of anonymization services want high speed, low latency and top level anonymization. Unfortunately, these factors exclude each in other, at least in parts.

Optimizing anonymization requires well distributed mix cascades, covering as many countries and continents as possible. But distributing the mixes of a cascade of course leads to large distances with distance causing latency. And latency in turn causes speed losses.

To cover different user preferences of different situations and different user locations, different cascades are needed.

For european users preferring high speed over anonymity, a cascade of mixes located in Europe is the best choice as the distance between their own location and the Entry Mix (as well as the distances between the mixes) determines latency and speed.

Intra-continental Mix Proxy Cascades for Europe
Advantage: Speed and low Latency for European users

	Entry Mix	Middle Mix	Exit Mix	Speed from Europe
Mix Names	Koelsch	Rousseau	SecureInternet	2,0-6,0MBit/s
Mix Locations	Germany	Germany	Switzerland
Operator Locations	Germany	Germany	Switzerland
Mix Names	Grolsch	Benda	SecureInternet3	1,5-3,5MBit/s
Mix Locations	Netherlands	Netherlands	Switzerland
Operator Locations	Germany	Germany	Switzerland

For the same reasons, for american users with the same preferences, a mix cascade located in America was best.

Intra-continental Mix Proxy Cascade for North America
Advantage: Speed and low Latency for American/Canadian users

	Entry Mix	Middle Mix	Exit Mix	Speed from Canada
Mix Names	Locke	Goose	SecureInternet4	1,5-2,0MBit/s
Mix Locations	USA	USA	Canada
Operator Locations	Germany	Germany	Switzerland
Mix Names	Sushi	SecureInternet8	Venus	1,2-1,5MBit/s
Mix Locations	USA	USA	Canada
Operator Locations	Germany	Switzerland	Great Britain

And last but not least, users with top preference for best possible anonymity, mix cascades covering various continents and as many as possible countries were best (as the amount of countries of mix and operator locations increases anonymity).

Trans-continental Mix Proxy Cascade across the Transatlantic:
Advantage: Best possible Anonymization by covering 2 Continents and 6 Countries

	Entry Mix	Middle Mix	Exit Mix	Speed from Canada
Mix Names	Fondue	Uranus	SecureInternet7	1,2MBit/s
Mix Locations	Netherlands	USA	Canada
Operator Locations	Germany	Great Britain	Switzerland

Mix proxy operators for technical reasons are not capable to know about the identity of mix proxy cascade users. This fact is ensured by the mix proxy technology invented by computer scientist David Chaum and developed at Technical University of Dresden.

For this reason, and as SecureInternet only runs Exit mixes and Middle Mixes, SecureInternet can never know about who the users are, using the mix proxy cascades. Additionally, SecureInternet signed a contract with Jondos (the billing provider) to never try to uncover user identities, no matter, whether following external inquiries or own interest.

Nonetheless, there are recurring questions from mix proxy cascade users, worrying about how secure they are when anonymously using the mix proxy cascades. We therefor today publish the following report.

Inquiries July 18, 2008 - May 19, 2010	Share	Granted	Declined
Direct governmental inquiries	86%	none	all
Indirect governmental inquiries (letters rogatory)	14%	none	all
Non-governmental inquiries	0%	none	-
Germany - Sub Total	100%	none	all
Direct governmental inquiries	0%	none	-
Indirect governmental inquiries (letters rogatory)	0%	none	-
Non-governmental inquiries	0%	none	-
All other countries - Sub Total	0%	none	-
WORLDWIDE - TOTAL	100%	none	all

To summarize the report results:
We in general only had inquiries from german authorities and all inquiries for user identities were declined as we anyway have no access to user identities. Additionally, we assure that we never tried to uncover user identities on our own.

We've entered another stage in carefully testing the new XMPP/Jabber server. Almmost probably we will enable anonymous registration with various methods. Also MUC (multi user chat rooms), PubSub and the File Transfer options will be enabled of course. The server will be opened only for further XMPP/Jabber Services on the first stage as XMPP transports seem not really stable (due to a closed shop policy of other instant messenging networks). The first public beta stage almost probably won't yet include libjinge/VoIP capability as there might be a problem with JonDonym as JonDonym only can mix TCP but no UDP protocol.