Most current operating systems (even Linux!) have a hard-on for search. This allows people to simply search for a file they've misplaced or even allows them to simply use it has their primary organization mechanism. Unfortunately, to allow for quick searches "indexes" have to be created. These indexes tell a lot about the contents of files. So even if you have an encrypted volume, if you allow it to be indexed you might as well not even bother encrypting it because much of the information will be plain text in the index. On Ubuntu I was able to go to System->Preferences->Search and Indexing. There I disabled everything. Don't forget to click on the tabs. Even after I did this though, the trackerd deamon was still running. So, I killed it. It remains to be seen if it will start again when I reboot.
Vista and OS/X both have indexing also. I was able to stumble around to turn it off on Vista (I think it's off at least), but you should still steer clear of these operating systems for a hardened system.
On a side note. I did see that OS/X has a simple knob to enable swap encryption! This is really cool, but unfortunately there's no technical details about what encryption mechanism is used, so I wouldn't trust it, but at least they're trying.
Encrypting swap is not so easy on Linux, but it's another necessity for a hardened system. It's outside of the scope of this blog post though.
Goals
I'd like to offer up these goals for the network. What goals are missing? Please respond with your thoughts on how these goals are already met by an existing network, or how they could be met by a new network.
- Security of transactions. Uploaders, Downloaders, and Data Facilitators must be protected from their transactions.
- This goal must be maintained assuming some fraction of participating nodes are subversively working in collusion, and that all network traffic between participants is visible to the attacker.
- This is the highest priority and no compromise outside of the necessity for practicality will be made at the expense of this goal.
- Note, security from participation is NOT a goal. That is the goal of a darknet.
- Protection of Data Facilitators excludes the use of public exit points from the network. These serve as legal and technological attack points.
- Specific entry points for data should also be avoided. These also serve as legal and technological attack points.
- Anyone at anytime can participate in the network given a computer and Internet connection. It should be a public network, not a private darknet.
- Darknets require existing relationships with others already participating. This would exclude a large portion of the population that would like to participate but know of no other people already participating or willing to participate.
- Trust is dispersed over a user defined number of nodes.
- Trust is based on the probability that some faction of nodes known are NOT evil. This faction is defined by the user on a per access basis.
- The plain text of the transaction must not be revealed until it has passed through enough nodes that the user is comfortable with the probability it has passed through a trustworthy node as compared to the risk of the transaction.
- This is one of the biggest problems with many anonymous peer to peer networks. Requests and transactions are plain text to immediate nodes. The legal recourse is that you could simply be passing the request through from someone else. However, for some networks an immediate node could perform statistical analysis of the transactions to yield a fairly strong certainty of a user's general network activity.
- No centralization.
- Centralization is very tempting, especially given the previous goals. There are many benefits including performance, reliability, and security. However, centralization provides a small number of attack points to cripple or completely disable the entire network.
- Proper centralized servers can also be expensive, requiring solicitation for donations, or other money making schemes such as advertisements.
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I don't know how to encrypt everything with Windows but Truecrypt might be a possiblity.
About Ubuntu, i just installed it on my laptop with ubuntu-8.04-alternate-i386.iso
The " alternate" is important here cause there is an automated option to encrypt everything. However i don't really know if the encryption is strong... but it's better than nothing i guess :D
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Encrypted-Ubuntu-7-10-68383.shtml
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