Privacy

Privacy-focused Linux Distributions to Secure Your Online Presence in 2021

Suparna Ganguly — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Linux distros are usually more secure than their Windows and Mac counterparts. Linux Operating Systems being open-source leaves very less scope of unauthorized access to its core. However, with the advancement of technologies, incidents of attacks are not rare.

Are you in a fix with the coming reports of Linux systems targeted malware attacks? Worried about your online presence? Then maybe it’s time to go for a secure, privacy-focused Linux distro. This article presents a guide to 3 privacy-oriented Linux distributions that respect your privacy online.

Why You Need a Privacy-focused Linux Distro

But before jumping into that, let’s have a brief overview regarding the importance of a secure Linux Operating System. You may know that the Operating System is the core software of your computer. It helps maintain communication across all the hardware, software, memory, and processor of the system. It also manages the hardware parts.

If your computer isn’t secure enough to use, then hackers can get easy access to the OS and can exploit it to view your files and track your presence on the internet. Privacy-focused Linux distributions offer a lot of good choices packed with the most reliable features to select from.

5 Privacy-focused Linux Distributions

Now let’s take a look at the most privacy-focused Linux distros that allow staying secure.

Septor Linux

Septor Linux is an OS created by the project called Serbian Linux. Serbian Linux also produces Serbian language-based general general-purpose Linux distribution. Septor implements the KDE Plasma desktop environment and is a newcomer among all other distros.

The Septor operating system offers a stable and reliable user experience. It’s suitable for a vast range of computers because it is built upon Debian GNU/Linux. So, a solid privacy level is what you can expect. The distro routes all of the internet traffic through Tor network to earn privacy credentials. The distro used to use a launcher script to pick up the latest Tor, however, now Tor comes in bundles with it by default.

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Tutanota Interviews Tim Verheyden, the Journalist Who Broke the Story on Google Employees Listening to People's Audio Recordings

Matthias Pfau — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 14:30:00 +0000

by Matthias Pfau

Google employees listen to you, but the issue of "ghost workers" transcends Google.

Investigative journalist Tim Verheyden, who broke the story on how Google employees listen to people’s audio recordings, explains in an interview how he got hold of the story, why he is now using the encrypted contact form Secure Connect by Tutanota and why the growing number of "ghost workers" in and around Silicon Valley is becoming a big issue in Tech.

Tutanota: Tim, you have broken a great story on VRT News about how employees of Google subcontractors listen to our conversations when using devices such as Google Home. What was that story about? What was the privacy violation?

Tim Verheyden: Google provides a range of information on privacy—and data gathering. In this particular case, Google says on audio gathering that it can save your audio to learn the sound of your voice, learn how we say phrases and words, recognize when we say "Ok Google" to improve speech recognition. Google does not speak about the human interaction in the chain of training the AI on speech recognition. For some experts, this is a violation of the new GDPR law.

Tutanota: How did the employee of the Google subcontractor who leaked the story get in touch with you?

Tim: By email, he shared his thoughts on an article we wrote about Alexa (Amazon) after Bloomberg broke the news about humans listening.

Tutanota: Tutanota has recently launched Secure Connect, and you had added this encrypted contact form to your website a few weeks ago. What do you expect from Secure Connect?

Tim: I hope it will encourage people with a story to get in contact. It does not always need to be a whitsleblower story. Because of security concerns—and other reasons—people are sometimes reluctant to contact a journalist. I hope Secure Connect will help build trust in relationships with journalists.

Tutanota: More and more journalists are offering Secure Connect so that whistleblowers can drop important information or get in touch with investigative journalists confidentially. Why do you believe a secure communication channel is important?

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Why Smart Cards Are Smart

Kyle Rankin — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 11:30:00 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

If you use GPG keys, learn about the benefits to storing them on a smart card.

GPG has been around for a long time and is used to secure everything from your email to your software. If you want to send an email to someone and be sure that no one else can read or modify it, GPG signing and encryption are the main method you'd use. Distributions use GPG to sign their packages, so you can feel confident that the ones you download and install from a package mirror have not been modified from their original state. Developers in many organizations follow the best practice of GPG-signing any code they commit to a repository. By signing their commits, other people can confirm that the changes that claim to come from a particular developer truly did. Web-based Git front ends like GitHub and GitLab let users upload their GPG public keys, so when they do commit signed code, the interface can display to everyone else that it has been verified.

Yet, all of the security ultimately comes down to the security of your private key. Once others have access to your private key, they can perform all of the same GPG tasks as though they were you. This is why you are prompted to enter a passphrase when you first set up a GPG key. The idea is that if attackers are able to copy your key, they still would need to guess your password before they could use the key. For all of the importance of GPG key security, many people still just leave their keys in ~/.gnupg directories on their filesystem and copy that directory over to any systems where they need to use GPG.

There is a better way. With OpenPGP smart cards, you can store your keys on a secure device that's protected with a PIN and not only store your keys more securely, but also use them more conveniently. Although some laptops come with integrated smart card readers, most don't. Thankfully, these devices are available as part of multi-function USB security token devices from a number of different vendors, and Linux Journal has published reviews of such products in the past. In this article, I discuss all the reasons OpenPGP smart cards are a better choice for storing your keys than your local filesystem.

Reason 1: Tamper-proof Key Storage

One of the main benefits of a smart card is that it stores your GPG keys securely. When you store your keys on a filesystem, anyone who can access that filesystem can copy off the keys. On a smart card, once keys go in, they never leave, neither accidentally nor from tampering. The smart card chips themselves are designed to be tamper-proof and resist attempts to extract key data even when someone has physical access. By putting keys on a smart card, you can have a reasonable assurance that your keys are safe, even from a determined attacker.

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Facebook, Not Microsoft, Is the Main Threat to Open Source

Glyn Moody — Tue, 04 Jun 2019 13:24:19 +0000

by Glyn Moody

In the future, Facebook won't be a social-media site.

Facebook is under a lot of scrutiny and pressure at the moment. It's accused of helping foreign actors to subvert elections by using ads and fake accounts to spread lies—in the US, for example—and of acting as a conduit for terrorism in New Zealand and elsewhere. There are calls to break up the company or at least to rein it in.

In an evident attempt to head off those moves, and to limit the damage that recent events have caused to Facebook's reputation, Mark Zuckerberg has been publishing some long, philosophical posts that attempt to address some of the main criticisms. In his most recent one, he calls for new regulation of the online world in four areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability. The call for data portability mentions Facebook's support for the Data Transfer Project. That's clearly an attempt to counter accusations that Facebook is monopolistic and closed, and to burnish Facebook's reputation for supporting openness. Facebook does indeed use and support a large number of open-source programs, so to that extent, it's a fair claim.

Zuckerberg' previous post, from the beginning of March 2019, is much longer, and it outlines an important shift in how Facebook will work to what he calls "A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking". Greater protection for privacy is certainly welcome. But, it would be naïve to think that Zuckerberg's post is simply about that. Once more, it is an attempt to head off a growing chorus of criticism—in this case, that Facebook undermines data protection. This is the key idea:

I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won't stick around forever.

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WebAuthn Web Authentication with YubiKey 5

Todd A. Jacobs — Tue, 21 May 2019 12:00:00 +0000

by Todd A. Jacobs

A look at the recently released YubiKey 5 hardware authenticator series and how web authentication with the new WebAuthn API leverages devices like the YubiKey for painless website registration and strong user authentication.

I covered the YubiKey 4 in the May 2016 issue of Linux Journal, and the magazine has published a number of other articles on both YubiKeys and other forms of multi-factor authentication since then. Yubico recently has introduced the YubiKey 5 line of products. In addition to the YubiKey's long-time support of multiple security protocols, the most interesting feature is the product's new support for FIDO2 and WebAuthn.

WebAuthn is an application programming interface (API) for web authentication. It uses cryptographic "authenticators", such as a YubiKey 5 hardware token to authenticate users, in addition to (or even instead of) a typical user name/password combination. WebAuthn is currently a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) candidate recommendation, and it's already implemented by major browsers like Chrome and Firefox.

This article provides an overview of the YubiKey 5 series, and then goes into detail about how the WebAuthn API works. I also look at how hardware tokens, such as the YubiKey 5 series, hide the complexity of WebAuthn from users. My goal is to demonstrate how easy it is to use a YubiKey to register and authenticate with a website without having to worry about the underlying WebAuthn API.

About the YubiKey 5 Series

The YubiKey 5 series supports a broad range of two-factor and multi-factor authentication protocols, including:

Challenge-response (HMAC-SHA1 and Yubico OTP).
Client to Authenticator Protocol (CTAP).
FIDO Universal 2nd-Factor authentication (U2F).
FIDO2.
Open Authorization, HMAC-Based One-Time Password (OATH-HOTP).
Open Authorization, Time-Based One-Time Password (OATH-TOTP).
OpenPGP.
Personal Identity Verification (PIV).
Web Authentication (WebAuthn).
Yubico One-Time Password (OTP).

In addition, the entire YubiKey 5 series (with the exception of the U2F/FIDO2-only Security Key model) now supports OpenPGP public key cryptography with RSA key sizes up to 4096 bits. This is a notable bump from the key sizes supported by some earlier models. Yubico's OpenPGP support also includes an additional slot for an OpenPGP authentication key for use within an SSH-compatible agent, such as GnuPG's gpg-agent.

Figure 1. YubiKey 5 Series

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Open Source--It's in the Genes

Glyn Moody — Mon, 06 May 2019 14:06:59 +0000

by Glyn Moody

What happens when you release 500,000 human genomes as open source? This.

DNA is digital. The three billion chemical bases that make up the human genome encode data not in binary, but in a quaternary system, using four compounds—adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine—to represent four genetic "digits": A, C, G and T. Although this came as something of a surprise in 1953, when Watson and Crick proposed an A–T and C–G pairing as a "copying mechanism for genetic material" in their famous double helix paper, it's hard to see how hereditary information could have been transmitted efficiently from generation to generation in any other way. As anyone who has made photocopies of photocopies is aware, analog systems are bad at loss-free transmission, unlike digital encodings. Evolution of progressively more complex structures over millions of years would have been much harder, perhaps impossible, had our genetic material been stored in a purely analog form.

Although the digital nature of DNA was known more than half a century ago, it was only after many years of further work that quaternary data could be extracted at scale. The Human Genome Project, where laboratories around the world pieced together the three billion bases found in a single human genome, was completed in 2003, after 13 years of work, for a cost of around $750 million. However, since then, the cost of sequencing genomes has fallen—in fact, it has plummeted even faster than Moore's Law for semiconductors. A complete human genome now can be sequenced for a few hundred dollars, with sub-$100 services expected soon.

As costs have fallen, new services have sprung up offering to sequence—at least partially—anyone's genome. Millions have sent samples of their saliva to companies like 23andMe in order to learn things about their "ancestry, health, wellness and more". It's exciting stuff, but there are big downsides to using these companies. You may be giving a company the right to use your DNA for other purposes. That is, you are losing control of the most personal code there is—the one that created you in the boot-up process we call gestation. Deleting sequenced DNA can be hard.

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Purism Launches Librem One, a Suite of Privacy-Protecting, No-Track, No-Ad Apps and Services

Bryan Lunduke — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 15:00:07 +0000

by Bryan Lunduke

Some time back, the folks from Purism sent me a question: "Would you like to record some voice-over for a little commercial we're making?"

"Sure," I say. "Why not?"

They give me a script, show me a rough cut of the footage, and I record a few lines. Easy peasy.

The only problem? The commercial was for something that I think is a really great idea. And, the finished commercial gave me a serious case of the giggles. Yet I couldn't tell anyone about it. I was sworn to secrecy.

For a person who runs his mouth for a living, secrecy isn't always so easy. Keeping my big, dumb mouth shut was downright painful. Painful, I say!

Luckily, I can now, as of today, spill the beans without getting into trouble.

Purism has just launched an online service it has dubbed "Librem One", which is, as Purism calls it, a "suite of apps and services designed to provide users with convenient alternatives to Big Tech products".

There are two components of Librem One that are offered free of cost (or, at least, choose your own price): Chat and Social Media.

The chat component—the aptly named "Librem Chat"—is built on Matrix (which I am also a big fan of) and includes end-to-end encrypted text chat plus audio and video chatting. And, since it's built on Matrix, it has access to all the other users on Matrix out there. Which may not be as big of a user pool as, say, Hangouts or something, but the user base is growing. Quickly.

The Social Media component is built using Activity Pub and Mastodon (a federated, free software social network system).

I want to pause right there a moment, because this is really interesting to me.

That means we now have a social media server that is supported via a subscription model. Not advertisements. Not data collection. Subscription. Which, in my opinion, is just a much better way to build a social network that respects user data and privacy.

Plus, this solves one of the biggest problems with picking and utilizing a Mastodon server up until this point—that they've mostly been run by hobbyists in their spare time. Thus, servers could go up or down or lose data at any time (which happened to me more than once). A professionally administered Mastodon social-media server supported as part of a subscription online service? Heck yes.

Then there are the services that aren't part of the free (in cost) tier, the ones you'll need to pay to gain access to: Librem Mail (encrypted email), Librem Tunnel (a VPN service), and, according to the Purism folks, they have plans to add a few additional services to Librem One in the future:

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Wizard Kit: How I Protect Myself from Surveillance

Augustine Fou — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 11:30:00 +0000

by Augustine Fou

Ever since the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Panopticlick initiative in 2010, I’ve been sensitized to the risks and potential harms that come from adtech’s tracking of consumers. Indeed, in the years since, it has gotten far far worse. People are only now discovering the bad stuff that has been going on. For example, iPhone apps have been secretly recording users' keystrokes (see ZDNet, Feb 8, 2019), and Android apps with more than 2 billion downloads were committing ad fraud on real humans’ devices behind their backs (see BuzzFeed News, Nov 2018). For many more examples of spying on consumers, documented over the years, see Know Who’s Spying on You at All Times.

The popular apps that many humans use continue to track then even if they are logged out, and they also track users who never created an account in the first place (see Facebook tracks both non-users and logged out users). And Google tracks users’ locations even if they turned off location and denied permissions to apps (see Google Tracks Location Even When Users Turn Service Off). Even good apps that never intended to track users may actually be doing so because the SDKs (software development kits) with which they were built may be tracking users and sending data off to others’ servers without their knowledge. Remember the story about the low cost bathroom scale that didn’t work if location was turned off on the smartphone and there was no internet connection? It turns out that the scale was sending data to bare IP addresses that could be traced back to China.

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Spy Games: the NSA and GCHQ Offer Their Software to the Open Source Community

David Habusha — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 12:30:00 +0000

by David Habusha

Spies worth their salt are generally expected to be good at keeping secrets. With dead drops, encryption, cyanide pills and the like, openly sharing useful information isn’t supposed to be a part of the job description.

So it caught more than a few of us off guard when a couple years ago, some of the top spy agencies began contributing code to GitHub, making it available to the masses by open-sourcing some of their software.

The National Security Agency, the American signals intelligence organization that is tasked with the majority of the cyber-snooping, has released two separate pages on GitHub. The first is the NSA's primary account on GitHub that has 17 listed repos, followed up by its more substantive “NSA Cybersecurity” page with its 31 repositories.

Even though the NSA appears to have been posting some of its software as open source since 2017, presumably a result in part of the effort from the US government to make more of the code produced by the USG available to the public, the agency made news in early January when it announced plans to release a new product to the Open Source community.

The software is called GHIDRA, and it has been described as a tool for reverse-engineering malware. According to reports, GHIDRA has been referenced in the past during the Vault7 document leaks and is available for use across all the major operating systems. Those who are curious for more information on this tool and how to use it can catch a glimpse at a demonstration that the NSA has committed to putting on at this year’s RSA conference.

However, with perhaps less fanfare, it would seem as though it was the Brits who first made the move to take some of their code open source. The British SigInt agency GCHQ released its first piece of open-source tooling with the Gaffer graph database back in 2015, beating the Americans by two years. At the time of writing, the good folks at Her Majesty’s cyber-snooping agency have 39 repositories on offer for all to try out, including one called the CyberChef, which is billed as the “Cyber Swiss Army Knife—a web app for encryption, encoding, compression, and data analysis”.

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Privacy, Mine: the Right of Individual Persons, Not of the Data

Augustine Fou — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 13:15:15 +0000

by Augustine Fou

“For true, lasting privacy, we must shift from the ‘privacy policies’ of companies, which spring from data protection laws, to the ‘privacy’ of individual persons, as contemplated by human rights laws.”

How do we accomplish this shift?

TL;DR (in summary)

Privacy pertains to the person; “privacy” is the state of being free from public attention and unwanted intrusion.
Data is not privacy, but data from or about a person can be private or not private depending on how it’s used, who is using it and who has control of it.
In the digital world, a person’s privacy policy is like the clothing that one puts on to signal what data they consider private and what is not private.
The companies (sites, apps and so on) that respect a person’s privacy will build relationships with that person over time.
The accumulation of trust over time incentivizes good behavior by both parties, to preserve value and not lose it instantly.

We live in the age of surveillance marketing, where consumers’ privacy is being violated without their knowledge, consent or recourse. Data from and about consumers is collected en masse by ad-tech companies and traded for profit. But few consumers knew about it until things blow up like the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal. Most consumers think they are interacting with the sites they’re visiting or the apps (like Facebook) they’re using, but they aren't aware of the dozens of hidden ad-tech trackers that siphon their data off to other places or the aggressive data collection and cross-device tracking of apps. Not only are they not aware, they also definitely did not give consent to third parties to use, buy and sell their data. They wouldn’t even know who ABCTechCompany was anyway if it asked for consent.

Consent Is Not the Same as Permission, But Consumers Are Tricked Anyway

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