Haven: Building the Most Secure Baby Monitor Ever?
Posted on December 22, 2017
| n8fr8
About eight months ago, friends at the Freedom of the Press Foundation reached out to us, to see if we were interested in prototyping an idea they had been batting around. They knew that from projects like CameraV and ProofMode, that we knew how to tap into the sensors on smartphones to do interesting things. They also knew we could connect devices together using encrypted messaging and onion routing, through our work on ChatSecure and Tor (Orbot!
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No more “Root” features in Orbot… use Orfox & VPN instead!
Posted on October 27, 2017
| n8fr8
Since I first announced the available of Orbot: Tor for Android about 8 years ago (wow!), myself and others have been working on various methods in which to make the capabilities of Tor available through the operating system. This post is to announce that as of the next, imminent release, Orbot v15.5, we will no longer be supporting the Root-required “Transproxy” method. This is due to many reasons.
First, it turns out that allowing applications to get “root” access on your device seems like a good idea, it can also be seen as huge security hole.
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Tracking usage without tracking people
Posted on June 8, 2017
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
One thing that has become very clear over the past years is that there is a lot of value in data about people. Of course, the most well known examples these days are advertising and spy agencies, but tracking data is useful for many more things. For example, when trying to build software that is intuitive and easy to use, having real data about how people are using the software can make a massive difference when developers and designers are working on improving their software.
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New research report on the challenges developers face
Posted on May 15, 2017
| Seamus Tuohy
The Guardian Project has been working with the F-Droid community to make it a secure, streamlined, and verifiable app distribution channel for high-risk environments. While doing this we have started to become more aware of the challenges and risks facing software developers who build software in closed and closing spaces around the world.
There are a wealth of resources available on how to support and collaborate with high-risk users.
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Imagining the challenges of developers in repressive environments
Posted on January 26, 2017
| Seamus Tuohy
The Guardian Project team spends a lot of time thinking about users. In our work we focus on easy-to-use applications for users in high-risk scenarios. Because of this we are very focused on security. In our current work with the FDroid community to make it a secure, streamlined, and verifiable app distribution channel for high-risk environments we have started to become more aware of the challenges and risks facing software developers who build software in high-risk environments.
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HOWTO: get all your Debian packages via Tor Onion Services
Posted on July 31, 2016
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
Following up on some privacy leaks that we looked into a while back, there are now official Debian Tor Onion Services for getting software packages and security updates, thanks to the Debian Sys Admin team. This is important for high risk use cases like TAILS covers, but also it is useful to make it more difficult to do some kinds of targeted attacks against high-security servers. The default Debian and Ubuntu package servers use plain HTTP with unencrypted connections.
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Building the most private app store
Posted on June 2, 2016
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
App stores can work well without any tracking at all
Attackers are increasingly seeing app stores as a prime attack vector, whether it is aimed at the masses like XCodeGhost or very targeted like in FBI vs Apple. When we install software from an app store, we are placing a lot of trust in a lot of different parties involved in getting the source code from the original developer delivered to our device in a useful form.
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PanicKit: making your whole phone respond to a panic button
Posted on January 12, 2016
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
Our mobile devices do so many things for us, making it easy to communicate with people in all manners while giving us access to all sorts of information wherever we are. But in times of anxiety and panic, it is difficult to quickly use them. Will you be too shaky to type in your PIN or lock pattern? Will you have enough time to find your trusted contacts and send them a message?
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Building a trustworthy app store that respects privacy
Posted on June 2, 2015
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
One core piece of our approach is thinking about very high risk situations, like Ai Weiwei or Edward Snowden, then making the tools for operating under that pressure as easy to use as possible. That means that we might occasionally come across as a little paranoid. It is important to dive into the depths of what might be possible. That is an essential step in evaluating what the risks and defenses are, and how to prioritize them.
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Experimental app to improve privacy in location sharing
Posted on January 29, 2015
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
As part of the T2 Panic effort, I’ve recently been diving deep into the issues of sharing location. It is unfortunately looking really bad, with many services, including Google, frequently sharing location as plain text over the network. I’ve started to write up some of the issues on this blog.
As part of this, I’ve put together an experimental Android app that aims to act as a privacy filter for all ways of sharing location.
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Sharing your location privately
Posted on January 23, 2015
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
Facebook location sharing embeds the location in every single message, providing a detailed log to the recipient, Facebook, and anyone Facebook shares that data with One handy feature that many smartphones give us is the ability to easily share our exact position with other people. You can see this feature in a lot of apps. Google Maps lets you click “Share” and send a URL via any method you have available.
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Automatic, private distribution of our test builds
Posted on June 6, 2014
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
One thing we are very lucky to have is a good community of people willing to test out unfinished builds of our software. That is a very valuable contribution to the process of developing usable, secure apps. So we want to make this process as easy as possible while keeping it as secure and private as possible. To that end, we have set up an FDroid repository of apps generated from the test builds that our build server generates automatically every time we publish new code.
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Keys, signatures, certificates, verifications, etc. What are all these for?
Posted on December 12, 2013
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
For the past two years, we have been thinking about how to make it easier for anyone to achieve private communications. One particular focus has been on the “security tokens” that are required to make private communications systems work. This research area is called internally Portable Shared Security Tokens aka PSST. All of the privacy tools that we are working on require “keys” and “signatures”, to use the language of cryptography, and these are the core of what “security tokens” are.
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Getting keys into your keyring with Gnu Privacy Guard for Android
Posted on December 6, 2013
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
Now that you can have a full GnuPG on your Android device with Gnu Privacy Guard for Android, the next step is getting keys you need onto your device and included in Gnu Privacy Guard. We have tried to make it as easy as possible without compromising privacy, and have implemented a few approaches, while working on others. There are a few ways to get this done right now.
Gnu Privacy Guard registered itself with Android as a handler of all the standard OpenPGP MIME types (application/pgp-keys, application/pgp-encrypted, application/pgp-signature), as well as all of the OpenPGP and GnuPG file extensions (.
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Turn Your Device Into an App Store
Posted on November 18, 2013
| cpu
As we’ve touched upon in previous blog posts the Google Play model of application distribution has some disadvantages. Google does not make the Play store universally available, instead limiting availability to a subset of countries. Using the Play store to install apps necessitates both sharing personal information with Google and enabling Google to remotely remove apps from your device (colloquially referred to as having a ‘kill switch’). Using the Play store also requires a functional data connection (wifi or otherwise) to allow apps to be downloaded.
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Your own private dropbox with free software
Posted on November 12, 2013
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
There are lots of file storage and sharing software packages out there that make it easy for a group of people to share files. Dropbox is perhaps the most well known of the group, it provides an easy way for a group of people to share files. The downside of Dropbox is that it is not a private service, just like any cloud-based service. Dropbox has total access to your files that you store there.
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Setting up your own app store with F-Droid
Posted on November 5, 2013
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
(_This blog post as now been cooked into an updated HOWTO_)
The Google Play Store for Android is not available in all parts of the world, US law restricts its use in certain countries like Iran, and many countries block access to the Play Store, like China. Also, the Google Play Store tracks all user actions, reporting back to Google what apps have been installed and also run on the phone.
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Issues when distributing software
Posted on October 31, 2013
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
There is currently a discussion underway on the Debian-security list about adding TLS and Tor functionality to the official repositories (repos) of Debian packages that is highlighting how we need to update how we think about the risks when distributing software. Mostly, we are used to thinking about making sure that the software that the user is installing is the same exact software that has been posted for distribution. This is generally handled by signing the software package, then verifying that signature on the user’s machine.
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Keeping data private means it must be truly deletable!
Posted on August 23, 2013
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
There are lots of apps these days that promise to keep your data secure, and even some that promise to wipe away private information mere seconds or minutes after it has been received. It is one thing to keep data out of view from people you don’t want seeing it, it is also important to be able to truly delete information. Unfortunately computers make it very difficult to make data truly disappear.
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Orbot v12 now in beta
Posted on July 24, 2013
| n8fr8
After much too long, we’ve got a new build of Orbot out, and it is… a stable beta! Nothing radically new here, just many small changes to continue to improve the experience of our hundreds of thousands of active users out in the world. There will likely be one or two more “beta” releases to iron out small issues in v12, but for now, this one is good to go.
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