the CryptoParty handbook - Version: 2013-08-21 - Back to Index
Whether you are an activist operating under a totalitarian regime, an employee determined to expose some wrongdoings in your company or a vengeful writer composing a bitchy portrait of your ex-wife, you need to protect your identity. If you are not collaborating with others, the focus lies on anonymity and not encryption or privacy.
If the message is urgent and the stakes are high, one easy way to just get it out quickly is going to an internet cafe one usually does not frequent, create accounts specifically set up for the task, deliver the data and discard those accounts right after that. If you are in a hurry, consider MintEmail (http://www.mintemail.com/) or FilzMail (http://www.filzmail.com/), where your address will expire from 3 to 24 hours respectively. Do not do anything else while you’re there; don’t check your Gmail account, do not have a quick one on Facebook and clear all cache, cookies and history and close the browser before you leave.
If you keep these basic rules, the worst – though highly improbable – thing that could happen would be that the offered computer is compromised and logging keystrokes, revealing passwords or even your face, in case an attached webcam is remotely operated. Don’t do this at work or in a place where you are a registered member or a regular visitor, like a club or a library.
If you want to maintain a constant stream of communication and maybe even establish an audience, this method quickly becomes quite cumbersome, and you might also run out of unused internet cafes. In this case you can use a machine you own, but, if you cannot dedicate one especially to this purpose, boot your computer with a different operating system (OS). This can be easily done by using a USB stick to boot a live operating system like TAILS, which comes with Tor enabled by default and includes state-of-the-art cryptographic tools. In any case, use Tor to disguise your IP.
Turn off all cookies, history and cache options and never use the same profile or the same browser for other activities. Not only would that add data to your topography as a user in the Net, but it also opens a very wide window for mistakes. If you want extra support, install Do Not Track Plus and Trackerblock or Ghostery in your browser add-ons menu.
Use passwords for different accounts and choose proper passwords or even passphrases (more about that in the basic tips section). Protect your entire system with a general password, change it often and do not share it with anyone, especially not your lover. Install a keystroke logger to see if someone sneaks into your email, especially your lover. Set up your preferences everywhere to log out of every service and platform after 5 minutes of non-use. Keep your superhero identity to yourself.
If you can mantain such level of discipline, you should even be capable of using your own internet connection. But consider this: not using a dedicated system makes it incredibly difficult to keep all the different identities separated in a safe way, and the feeling of safety often leads to carelessness. Keep a healthy level of neurosis.
Today there are many publishing possibilities, from cost-free blogging sites (Blogspot, Tumblr, WordPress, Identi.ca) to PasteBins (see glossary) and some specifically catered to anonymous users like BlogACause. Global Voices Advocacy recommends using WordPress through the Tor network. Keep a sane level of cynicism; they all act in commercial interests that you use for ‘free’ and so cannot be trusted at all, especially in that they may be bound to the demands of a legal juristiction that is not your own. All providers are, when it comes down to it, traitors.
If registration with these services requires a working email address, create one dedicated solely to this purpose. Avoid Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and other big commercial platforms with a history of turning over their users and go for an specialized service like Hushmail (https://www.hushmail.com/). For more on anonymous email, please find the chapter Anonymous email in the previous section.
Don’t register a domain. There are services that will protect your identity from a simple who is query, like Anonymous Speech or Silent Register, but they will know who you are through your payment data. Unless you have the chance to purchase one in BitCoins, limit yourself to one of the domains offered by your blogging platform like yourblogname.blogspot.com and choose a setting outside your native country. Also, find a name that doesn’t give you away easily. If you have problems with that, use a blog name generator online.
Don’t open a social network account associated to your blog. If you must, keep the level of hygiene that you keep for blogging and never ever login while using your regular browser. If you have a public social network life, avoid it all together. You will eventually make a mistake.
Don’t upload video, photo or audio files without using an editor to modify or erase all the meta data (photos contain information up to the GPS coordinates of the location the photo was taken at) that standard digital cameras, SmartPhones, recorders and other devices add by default. The Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit or ExifTool might help you with that.
Don’t leave a history. Add X-Robots-Tag to your http headers to stop the searching spiders from indexing your website. That should include repositories like the Wayback Machine from archive.org. If you don’t know how to do this, search along the lines of “Robots Text File Generator”.
Don’t leave comments. If you must, maintain the levels of hygiene that you use for blogging and always logout when you’re done and for god sakes do not troll around. Hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned.
Don’t expect it to last. If you hit the pot and become a blogging sensation (like Belle de Jour, the British PhD candidate who became a sensation and sold a book and mused two TV shows about her double life as a high escort) there will be a legion of journalists, tax auditors and obsessive fans scrutinizing your every move. You are only human: they will get to you.
Don’t linger. If you realize you have already made any mistakes but nobody has caught you yet, do close all your accounts, cover your tracks and start a totally new identity. The Internet has infinite memory: one strike, and you’re out of the closet.
Every data packet traveling through the Internet contains information about its sender and its recipient. This applies to email as well as any other network communication. There are several ways to reduce identifying information but no way to remove it completely.
One option is to use a throw-away email account. This is an account set up at a service like Gmail or Hotmail, used once or twice for anonymous exchange. When signing up for the account, you will need to provide fake information about your name and location. After using the account for a short amount of time, say 24 hours, you should never log in again. If you need to communicate further, then create a new account.
It is very important to keep in mind that these services keep logs of the IP addresses of those using them. If you are sending highly sensitive information, you will need to combine a throw away email account with Tor in order keep your IP address hidden.
If you are not expecting a reply, then an anonymous remailer like AnonEmail or Silentsender may be a useful solution. A remailer is a server that receives messages with instructions on where to send the data and acts as a relay, forwarding it from a generic address without revealing the identity of the original sender. This works best when combined with an email provider like Hushmail or RiseUp who are specially set up for secure email connections.
Both of these methods are useful, but only if you always remember that the intermediary himself knows where the original message came from and can read the messages as they come in. Despite their claims to protect your identity, these services often have user agreements that indicate their right “to disclose to third parties certain registration data about you” or they are suspected to be compromised by secret services. The only way to safely use this technique is to not trust these services at all, and apply extra security measures: send via Tor using a throw-away email address.
If you only need to receive email, services like Mailinator and MintEmail give you an email address that destroys itself after a few hours. When signing up for any account, you should provide fake information about your name and location and protect yourself by using Tor.
The content of your message can give away your identity. If you mention details about your life, your geography, social relations or personal appearance, people may be able to determine who is sending the message. Even word choice and style of writing can be used to guess who might be behind anonymous emails.
You should not use the same user name for different accounts or use a name that you are already linked to like a childhood nickname or a favorite book character. You should never use your secret email for normal personal communication. If someone knows your secrets, do not communicate with that person using this email address. If your life depends on it, change your secret email address often as well as between providers.
Finally, once you have your whole email set up to protect your identity, vanity is your worst enemy. You need to avoid being distinct. Don’t try to be clever, flamboyant or unique. Even the way you break your paragraphs is valuable data for identification, especially these days when every school essay and blog post you have written is available in the Internet. Powerful organizations can actually use these texts to build up a database that can “fingerprint” writing.
The term File Sharing refers to the practice of sharing files on a network, often with widest possible distribution in mind. Unfortunately in recent years the term has come to be popularly associated with the distribution of content registered under certain copyright licenses that disallow the distribution of copies (eg. supposed criminal activity). Regardless of this new association, file sharing remains a vital tool for many world wide: from academic groups to scientific networks and open source software communities.
In this book we wish to help you learn to privately distribute files, with other consenting people, without the content of that exchange known to others or the transaction stopped by an external party. Your basic right to anonymity and to not be spied upon protects that. Suspicions that those things might have been stolen and are not yours to give does not undermine that same and original right to privacy.
The history of the internet is littered with attacks of different types on publication and distribution nodes, conducted by different means (court order, Distributed Denial of Service attacks). What such events have demonstrated is that if one wants information to be persistently available and robust against attack, it is a mistake to rely upon a single node which can be neutralised.
This has recently been demonstrated by the takedown of the direct download service Megaupload, whose disappearance led to the loss of massive amounts of its users’ data, much of it extraneous even to the alleged copyright infringements which formed the pretext for its closure. In similar vein ISPs will often take down web sites containing disputed material merely because it is cheaper for them to do so than to go to court and have a judge decide. Such policies leave the door open to groundless bullying by all manner of companies, organisations and individuals ready and willing to make aggressive use of legal letters. Both direct download services and ISPs are examples of centralised structures which cannot be relied upon both because they are a single point of failure for attack, and because their commercial interests are not aligned with those of their users.
Spreading files through distribution, decentralising the data, is the best way to defend against such attacks. In the following section two realms of filesharing are profiled. The first are standard p2p technologies whose technical design is determined by the efficiency of the networks in enabling speed of distribution and discovery of content through associated search mechanisms. The second focuses on I2P as an example of a so-called darknet, its design prioritises security and anonymity over other criteria offering a robust, if less resource efficient, path to persistent availability.
The means of sharing files mentioned below are just some examples of the many P2P technologies that were developed since 1999. BitTorrent and Soulseek have very different approaches, both however were designed for easy usability by a wide public and have significant user communities. I2P is of more recent development and has a small user base.
BitTorrent has become the most popular P2P file-sharing system. The controversy that surrounds it nowadays ironically seems to help the community grow, while police, lobbied by powerful copyright holders seize torrent-tracker server hardware and pursue their operators, sometimes to the point of jailing them as in the case of The Pirate Bay.
Soulseek - while it has never been the most popular file-sharing platform, neither did it ever have the ambition. Soulseek focuses on the exchange of music between enthusiasts, underground producers, fans and researchers. The system and the community around it is completely isolated from the Web: Soulseek files can’t be linked to. They are kept exclusively on the hard-disks of Soulseek users. The content of the network fully depends on how many members are connected and what they share. Files are transferred only between two users at a time and nobody but those two users are involved. Because of this ‘introverted’ character - and the specificity of its content - Soulseek has stayed out of sight of legislation and non-pro-copy copyright advocates.
I2P is one of several systems developed to resist censorship (others include FreeNet and Tor) and has a much smaller user community, it is highlighted here because of its inclusion of Bit Torrent functionality within its basic installation. These systems can also be used to provide hidden services, amongst others, enabling you to publish web pages within their environments.
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol that facilitates distribution of data stored across multiple nodes/participants of the network. There are no central servers or hubs, each node is capable of exchanging data with any other node, sometimes hundreds of them simultaneously. The fact that data is exchanged in parts between numerous nodes allows for great download speeds for popular content on BitTorrent networks, making it quickly the de facto P2P file-sharing platform.
If you are using BitTorrent to circulate material of ambiguous legality, you should know that enforcement agents typically collect information on allegedly infringing peers by participating in torrent swarms, observing and documenting the behaviour of other peers. The large number of users creates a difficulty for the enforcement system simply at the level of scaling up - there simply are not the resources to pursue every user. Any court case will require actual evidence of data transfer between your client and another (and usually evidence of you uploading), it is enough that you provide even part of the file, not the file in its entirety, for a prosecution to have legs. But if you prefer to lean towards greater caution, you should use a VPN to route your BitTorrent traffic, as detailed in the Using VPN chapter.
Leeching (downloading) of a file from BitTorrent network begins with a torrent file or magnet link. A torrent file is a small file containing information on the larger files you want to download. The torrent file tells your torrent client the names of the files being shared, a URL for the tracker and a hash code, which is a unique code representing, and derived from, the underlying file - kind of like an ID or catalog number. The client can use that hash to find others seeding (uploading) those files, so you can download from their computers and check the authenticity of the chunks as they arrive.
A Magnet Link does away with the need for a torrent file and is essentially a hyperlink containing a description for that torrent, which your torrent client can immediately use to start finding people sharing the file you are willing to download. Magnet links don’t require a tracker, instead they rely on Distributed Hash Table (DHT) - which you can read more about in the Glossary - and Peer Exchange. Magnet links do not refer to a file by its location (e.g. by IP addresses of people who have the file, or URL) but rather defines search parameters by which this file can be found. When a magnet link is loaded, the torrent client initiates an availability search which is broadcast to other nodes and is basically a shout-out “who’s got anything matching this hash?!”. Torrent client then connects to the nodes which responded to the shout-out and begins to download the file.
BitTorrent uses encryption to prevent providers and other man-in-the-middle from blocking and sniffing your traffic based on the content you exchange. Since BitTorrent swarms (flocks of seeders and leechers) are free for everyone to join it is possible for anyone to join a swarm and gather information about all connected peers. Using magnet links will not prevent you from being seen in a swarm; any of the nodes sharing the same file must communicate between each-other and thus, if just one of the nodes in your swarm is rogue, it will be able to see your IP address. It will also be able to determine if you are seeding the data by sending your node a download request.
One important aspect of using BitTorrent is worth a special mention. Every chunk of data that you receive (leech) is being instantly shared (seeded) with other BitTorrent users. Thus, a process of downloading transforms into a process of (involuntary) publishing, using a legal term - making available of that data, before the download is even complete. While BitTorrent is often used to re-distribute freely available and legitimate software, movies, music and other materials, its “making available” capacity created a lot of controversy and led to endless legal battles between copyright holders and facilitators of BitTorrent platforms. At the moment of writing this text, the co-founder of The Pirate Bay Gottfrid Svartholm is being detained by Swedish police after an international warrant was issued against him.
For these reasons, and a public relations campaign by copyright holders, use of BitTorrent platforms has become practically analogous to piracy. And while the meaning of terms such as piracy, copyright and ownership in digital context is yet to be settled, many ordinary BitTorrent users have been already prosecuted on the basis of breaking copyright laws.
Most torrent clients allow you to block IP addresses of known copyright trolls using blacklists. Instead of using public torrents one can also join closed trackers or use BitTorrent over VPN or Tor.
In situations when you feel that you should be worried about your BitTorrent traffic and it’s anonymity go through the following check-list:
As a peer to peer (P2P) file sharing program, the content available is determined by the users of the Soulseek client, and what files they choose to share. The network has historically had a diverse mix of music, including underground and independent artists, unreleased music, such as demos and mix-tapes, bootlegs, etc. It is is entirely financed by donations, with no advertising or user fees.
“Soulseek does not endorse nor condone the sharing of copyrighted materials. You should only share and download files which you are legally allowed to, or have otherwise received permission to, share.” (http://www.soulseekqt.net)
Soulseek network depends on a pair of central servers. One server supports the original client and network, and the other supporting the newer network. While these central servers are key to coordinating searches and hosting chat rooms, they do not actually play a part in the transfer of files between users, which takes place directly between the users concerned.
Users can search for items; the results returned being a list of files whose names match the search term used. Searches may be explicit or may use wildcards/patterns or terms to be excluded. A feature specific to the Soulseek search engine is the inclusion of the folder names and file paths in the search list. This allows users to search by folder name.
The list of search results shows details, such as the full name and path of the file, its size, the user who is hosting the file, together with that users’ average transfer rate, and, in the case of mp3 files, brief details about the encoded track itself, such as bit rate, length, etc. The resulting search list may then be sorted in a variety of ways and individual files (or folders) chosen for download.
Unlike BitTorrent, Soulseek does not support multi-source downloading or “swarming” like other post-Napster clients, and must fetch a requested file from a single source.
While the Soulseek software is free, a donation scheme exists to support the programming effort and cost of maintaining the servers. In return for donations, users are granted the privilege of being able to jump ahead of non-donating users in a queue when downloading files (but only if the files are not shared over a local area network). The Soulseek protocol search algorithms are not published, as those algorithms run on the server. However several Open Source implementations of server and client software exist for Linux, OS X and Windows.
Regarding privacy and copyright issues Soulseek stand quite far away from BitTorrent too. Soulseek has been taken to court only once, in 2008, but even that did not go anywhere. There are no indications of Soulseek users ever being brought to court or accused of illegal distribution of copyrighted materials or any other ‘digital-millenium’ crimes.
If you want to use the Soulseek network with some degree of real anonymity, you will need to use it over a VPN.
I2P began as a fork from the Freenet project, originally conceived as a method for censorship-resistant publishing and distribution. From their website:
The I2P project was formed in 2003 to support the efforts of those trying to build a more free society by offering them an uncensorable, anonymous, and secure communication system. I2P is a development effort producing a low latency, fully distributed, autonomous, scalable, anonymous, resilient, and secure network. The goal is to operate successfully in hostile environments - even when an organization with substantial financial or political resources attacks it. All aspects of the network are open source and available without cost, as this should both assure the people using it that the software does what it claims, as well as enable others to contribute and improve upon it to defeat aggressive attempts to stifle free speech. (http://www.i2p2.de/)
For a guide to installing the software and configuring your browser see section on Secure Filesharing - Installing I2P. Once complete, on launch you will be brought to a console page containing links to popular sites and services. In addition to the usual webpages (referred to as eePsites) there are a range of applications services available ranging from the blogging tool Syndie to a built in BitTorrent client which functions through a web interface.
the CryptoParty handbook - Version: 2013-08-21 - Back to Index