Anonymity

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General Services

Virtual Private Servers

A VPS is your own personal server, hosted within a Virtual Machine. This is not as private as a Dedicated Server, as your information is accessible within a Shared environment, however they are cheap.

Virtual Private Networks

A Virtual Private Network is an encrypted tunnel to a remote server running a VPN daemon such as OpenVPN. This allows you to authenticate over IPSEC and many other protocols to access remote networks as if they were local, depending on the configuration of your VPN. VPN Providers provide a simple tunnel, but not usually remote network resources. Essentially, VPN providers just offer an encrypted tunnel to proxy your connection from. However, using a VPS with TUN/TAP, or a Dedicated Server with OpenVPN running, you can setup your own network with internal resources.

SSH Tunneling

An SSH tunnel is the process of encapsulating another Internet protocol within an existing SSH connection. This is often used for secured web-browsing, breaking out from restrictive firewalls or adding encryption to otherwise unencrypted traffic.

You can effectively tunnel all of your local traffic through a remote server that you have an SSH account enabled on. Not only will your traffic appear to be originating from the remote servers IP address, but all traffic between yourself, your remote server and the final destination will be encrypted using the SSH protocol. This is a great technique for anonymity as it hides your original IP address and adds an extra layer of security to your communications.

Basic Example of SSH Tunneling

Terminal

localhost:~ $ ssh -D 8080 user@remotebox

What this does is tells your computer to listen on localhost:8080, and forward all requests to user@remotebox. Set your browser or application to use 127.0.0.1:8080 as a SOCKS5 proxy, and it will forward your traffic, provided your sshd_config is set to permit tunnel traffic.

Shell Accounts

Shell accounts are simply a term for individual accounts on an SSH server. There are hundreds of providers of free shells accounts online, that will give you your own non-root account with SSH access on their server. Paid shell accounts also exist and usually supply you with more features such as root access or unrestricted outbound access. These accounts, free or paid, are a quick and easy way to create a secured proxy via SSH tunnelling. Often times you will be able to use the account for other things such as email or IRC access. The link below contains a rather large list of free and paid shell account providers, detailing which features are offered at each host and other important information.

http://shells.red-pill.eu/

FTP / Telnet

Regular FTP and Telnet communications are outdated and generally considered to be very insecure. You are not suggested to use these protocols if you have any of the above methods available to you.

Suggested replacements for these protocol include:

• SFTP
• SCP
• FTPS (Command and Data channel)

SSH is the logical replacement for Telnet, however there are plenty of tools to wrap a telnet-style session in SSL/TLS layers, such as NCAT

Web-Browsing

General

Best Practices

• Unless you have referrers turned off with an addon or browser configuration, it's usually better to copy and paste links to a different tab/window/browser to avoid referrer or link tracking from affecting you.

• Don't do your personal browsing from the same user profile (or same computer if possible) as your business/important browsing, e.g. Banking Sites or Work Websites.

• If personal information is not required, don't give it out. If a form requires values in a field, many pieces of software as well as web applications fail to validate the user's purported identity. As a result, these softwares are responsible for a large amount of online fraud.

• Be mindful of checkboxes, especially if ask if you want to be subscribed to a mailing list. This should be obvious, but it needs to be said.

Firefox

First and foremost, if you haven't visited PluginCheck, go ahead and do so now. No really, we'll wait.

Recommended Extensions

Extension	Purpose	Link
Adblock Plus	Filters a lot of ads, regular updates	XPI
Adblock Plus Popup Addon	Enhancement to ABP, blocks popups	Addon Site
BetterPrivacy	Blocks Flash Cookies & LSOs	Addon Site
Disconnect	Blocks Social Media tracking widgets	Addon Site
DoNotTrack Plus	Blocks Social Network, Ad Company ads	Addon Site
FlashBlock	Blocks Flash/Silverlight, enables click-to-play	Addon Site
NoScript	Blocks javascript unless you allow it per site	Addon Site
Torbutton	Enables quick access to the Tor network, provided you have Tor installed	Addon Site
User Agent Switcher	Allows you to emulate almost any device or OS with a menu-driven interface	Addon Site Latest XML
Ghostery	Blocks all third-party tracking	Addon Site

The latest version of torbutton does not allow toggling the tor proxy on and off. You should use the Tor Browser Bundle instead

TODO

- Cookies & cache
- Proxies
- Tor
- Privoxy
- Using SSH tunnels as a SOCKS5 proxy
- Online purchases
- Private browsing
- Google vs Scroogle (Note: Scroogle is now dead: http://www.scroogle.org/sucks.html)
- Google vs StartPage vs DuckDuckGo
- Personal Identifiable Information

Email Privacy

PGP / GNUPG Encryption

PGP is an encryption method based on private and public key files, which can be used to easily encrypt or sign messages. The PGP software is available for all major operating systems and is very easy to setup and use. When you first setup PGP, you will create a key pair that is used for all future encryption and signing. It is also possible to digitally 'sign' a message or file using your PGP key pair. When your key pair is created, it is given a unique signature that is specific to you and your email address.

By signing a message or file, your PGP signature is attached to the document and can be used to verify that you are who you say you are. This is very useful for email correspondence where it is possible for messages to be intercepted or otherwise tampered with. If you encrypt and sign an email message using PGP, you are verifying to the recipient that you are the original sender and also making sure that your message cannot be read during transmission.

PGP is a public key encryption system. Each user has a keypair, a public and a private key. A message to the recipient is encrypted with *his* public key, and then can only be decrypted with his private key. A user gives their public key to their friends/coworkers/whoever themselves, or publishes the key in a keypool.

Anyone who has access to your private key is capable of decrypting messages were encrypted using your public key. Your private key, on the other hand, should not be given out to anyone and you must keep it in a safe location to avoid theft or copying. If your private key is stolen, it would be possible for the attacker to sign and encrypt messages using your digital identity. Most private keys are encrypted with a passphrase to help defend against theft.

Anonymous Remailers

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Throw-away Accounts

Throw-away account are one-time-usage email accounts that when paired with message encryption and some form of traffic proxying (Tor, SSH tunnel, etc) provide a very good method for sending or receiving anonymous emails. There are services that will provide free throw-away accounts but these generally limit you to either sending or receiving only and for a limited period of time. If this is not ideal for your situation, you could always create a free email account with any provider and simply use the account for a specific period of time or specific purpose.

When using throw-away accounts, it is very important that you take all the usual steps in protecting your identity and anonymity. This includes making sure your IP address is hidden via proxying, avoiding DNS leaks and encryption the messages you send or receive. If you are not using a throw-away email service, make sure you delete your messages from the Inbox and Sent Messages after every single correspondence.

Files & Hard-Disk Encryption

- TrueCrypt
- One Time Pads
- Full Disk Encryption
- IronKey USB drives
- Operating System logs
- System memory
- Forensics

Possible Downfalls

Network Performance

When using multiple proxies or other means of hiding your IP address, one of the main downfalls is latency. With more connections and hops that need to be made between you and your final destination, the connection will take longer and longer to be made. This is most evident in systems like the TOR network, for example. While TOR does provide reasonably good anonymity, it also takes much longer for connections to occur.

Personal Information

While Tor provides anonymity via onion routing to hide your IP, anyone can run a Tor node, so you should be cautious what kind of information you transmit over the Tor network, as it might be subject to interception, which is usually why you use Tor to connect to an two-way encrypted endpoint.

IP Leaks

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DNS Leaks

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