Slashdot Mirror
Will ParanoidLinux Protect the Truly Paranoid?
ruphus13 writes "There are still places on the world where having anonymity might mean the difference between life and death. Covering one's tracks is considered to be of such paramount importance that we are now witnessing the rise of a Linux distro catering to the most paranoid. The 'alpha-alpha' version of ParanoidLinux is now out. But is this the best way to protect oneself? Couldn't it be easily circumvented? The article asks, 'Why is it necessary to put the applications and services designed to protect anonymity, to encrypt files, to make the user nameless and faceless, all together, in one distribution? Let's think in a truly paranoid manner. Wouldn't it be far easier for a nefarious government organization to target that distribution's repositories, mirror that singular distribution's disk images with files of its own design, and leave every last one of that distribution's users in the great wide open?' What should truly paranoid user do?"
The truly paranoid user should get some help...
Trust no one?
Read my blog.
A truly paranoid person would be suspicious of absolutely everyone and everything. That would mean writing your own OS on your own hardware etc etc.
Since this is impossible, go and live in hiding with no human contact or chance thereof.
Why would you download this 'super-safe' OS from some people you never met, through a public unencrypted network, if your life depended on it?
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow uses this idea (and name), and the distro was started based on that.
The meme is dead, long live the meme!
If you do not examine the source, how can you trust any piece of software? You are in effect agreeing to trust the unknown people that have looked at the source. Except in the case of a smallish distribution nobody may have actually looked into that particular distribution in any detail at all.
Of course, there is a greater issue of trust. If you accept chips made by unknown fabricators, do you know what microcode has been implemented? If you cannot examine the "source code" of the chips being used how can you actually trust that these chips are not doing things behind your back to reveal your identity and files?
So without a truly "open" computer, you are trusting a whole raft of unknown individuals and companies with your identity, your data, your reputation.
Moreover, if you are not knowledgeable about programming languages, using any computer is an act of utter faith with plenty of reason to not be so trusting. It is like climbing a mountain with a guide that only lost "a few" parties last year.
"What should truly paranoid user do?"
Stay off the internet.
Gone!
1. Always borrow random open wifi access points,
in a geographic pattern not centered around your habitual location
2. Get a new unknowing assistant to type in roughly what you want to say each time. There are pattern detectors for your ways of expressing things.
3. Establish online identities such as gmail that have no tie whatsoever to any of your identity info or financial info
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
This slashdot story was posted to get us to use Paranoid Linux, which can only mean that some one planted a backdoor in it.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
self help books?
The truly paranoid user should get use a liveCD with a mac address scrambler off of a wireless connection that does not belong to them.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
What should truly paranoid user do?
get help?
get BSD?
Seriously, there is already an OS aimed at security... OpenBSD:
"Our efforts emphasize portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography."
"Audit Process:
Our security auditing team typically has between six and twelve members who continue to search for and fix new security holes. We have been auditing since the summer of 1996. The process we follow to increase security is simply a comprehensive file-by-file analysis of every critical software component. We are not so much looking for security holes, as we are looking for basic software bugs, and if years later someone discovers the problem used to be a security issue, and we fixed it because it was just a bug, well, all the better. Flaws have been found in just about every area of the system. Entire new classes of security problems have been found during our audit, and often source code which had been audited earlier needs re-auditing with these new flaws in mind. Code often gets audited multiple times, and by multiple people with different auditing skills."
OBVIOUSLY the paranoid individual will not allow anyone else to see the self help book, let alone publish it.
Also, the self help book will be written freehand in blood. Every time the paranoid reads the book they will DNA test the blood to ensure that it is their own blood. DNA tests are ofcourse done in house and using tools that the paranoid has already assembled based on research that they have done themselves.
Still, there is a risk of clone operatives... but isn't there always?
I think a lot of people misunderstand the concept of "single point of failure". With all of this stuff in one place, yes, there's only one place that attackers need to attack. But there's also only one place that defenders need to defend. The alternative is that all these security programs remain scattered in lots of places on the Internet. True, attackers probably won't be able to subvert more than a couple of those, but it only takes one flaw in your security for them to get you. If you subverted GPG, it doesn't matter much that TrueCrypt is still working for you. If someone subverted SSL, or DNS, and it doesn't matter much that the Linux Kernel is still secure. Best to get everything from one place, and make sure that one place is really, REALLY damn secure.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I'd say he's well on his way to achieving this.
Engineering is the art of compromise.