Tag Archives: anonymity

The Decoupling Principle

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/the-decoupling-principle.html

This is a really interesting paper that discusses what the authors call the Decoupling Principle:

The idea is simple, yet previously not clearly articulated: to ensure privacy, information should be divided architecturally and institutionally such that each entity has only the information they need to perform their relevant function. Architectural decoupling entails splitting functionality for different fundamental actions in a system, such as decoupling authentication (proving who is allowed to use the network) from connectivity (establishing session state for communicating). Institutional decoupling entails splitting what information remains between non-colluding entities, such as distinct companies or network operators, or between a user and network peers. This decoupling makes service providers individually breach-proof, as they each have little or no sensitive data that can be lost to hackers. Put simply, the Decoupling Principle suggests always separating who you are from what you do.

Lots of interesting details in the paper.

ProtonMail Now Keeps IP Logs

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/09/protonmail-now-keeps-ip-logs.html

After being compelled by a Swiss court to monitor IP logs for a particular user, ProtonMail no longer claims that “we do not keep any IP logs.”

EDITED TO ADD (9/14): This seems to be more complicated. ProtonMail is not yet saying that they keep logs. Their privacy policy still states that they do not keep logs except in certain circumstances, and outlines those circumstances. And ProtonMail’s warrant canary has an interesting list of data orders they have received from various authorities, whether they complied, and why or why not.

Apple Will Offer Onion Routing for iCloud/Safari Users

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/06/apple-will-offer-onion-routing-for-icloud-safari-users.html

At this year’s Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple announced something called “iCloud Private Relay.” That’s basically its private version of onion routing, which is what Tor does.

Privacy Relay is built into both the forthcoming iOS and MacOS versions, but it will only work if you’re an iCloud Plus subscriber and you have it enabled from within your iCloud settings.

Once it’s enabled and you open Safari to browse, Private Relay splits up two pieces of information that — when delivered to websites together as normal — could quickly identify you. Those are your IP address (who and exactly where you are) and your DNS request (the address of the website you want, in numeric form).

Once the two pieces of information are split, Private Relay encrypts your DNS request and sends both the IP address and now-encrypted DNS request to an Apple proxy server. This is the first of two stops your traffic will make before you see a website. At this point, Apple has already handed over the encryption keys to the third party running the second of the two stops, so Apple can’t see what website you’re trying to access with your encrypted DNS request. All Apple can see is your IP address.

Although it has received both your IP address and encrypted DNS request, Apple’s server doesn’t send your original IP address to the second stop. Instead, it gives you an anonymous IP address that is approximately associated with your general region or city.

Not available in China, of course — and also Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and the Philippines.

Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/12/oblivious-dns-over-https.html

This new protocol, called Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS (ODoH), hides the websites you visit from your ISP.

Here’s how it works: ODoH wraps a layer of encryption around the DNS query and passes it through a proxy server, which acts as a go-between the internet user and the website they want to visit. Because the DNS query is encrypted, the proxy can’t see what’s inside, but acts as a shield to prevent the DNS resolver from seeing who sent the query to begin with.

IETF memo.

The paper:

Abstract: The Domain Name System (DNS) is the foundation of a human-usable Internet, responding to client queries for host-names with corresponding IP addresses and records. Traditional DNS is also unencrypted, and leaks user information to network operators. Recent efforts to secure DNS using DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) havebeen gaining traction, ostensibly protecting traffic and hiding content from on-lookers. However, one of the criticisms ofDoT and DoH is brought to bear by the small number of large-scale deployments (e.g., Comcast, Google, Cloudflare): DNS resolvers can associate query contents with client identities in the form of IP addresses. Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH) safeguards against this problem. In this paper we ask what it would take to make ODoH practical? We describe ODoH, a practical DNS protocol aimed at resolving this issue by both protecting the client’s content and identity. We implement and deploy the protocol, and perform measurements to show that ODoH has comparable performance to protocols like DoH and DoT which are gaining widespread adoption,while improving client privacy, making ODoH a practical privacy enhancing replacement for the usage of DNS.

Slashdot thread.

Tracking Users on Waze

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/10/tracking-users-on-waze.html

A security researcher discovered a wulnerability in Waze that breaks the anonymity of users:

I found out that I can visit Waze from any web browser at waze.com/livemap so I decided to check how are those driver icons implemented. What I found is that I can ask Waze API for data on a location by sending my latitude and longitude coordinates. Except the essential traffic information, Waze also sends me coordinates of other drivers who are nearby. What caught my eyes was that identification numbers (ID) associated with the icons were not changing over time. I decided to track one driver and after some time she really appeared in a different place on the same road.

The vulnerability has been fixed. More interesting is that the researcher was able to de-anonymize some of the Waze users, proving yet again that anonymity is hard when we’re all so different.