anonymizer

4 Articles

Russian Hackers Domain Fronting

March 28, 2017 by 51 Comments

FireEye just put out a report on catching the Russian hacker group “Advanced Persistent Threat 29” (APT29, for lack of a better code name) using the meek plugin for TOR to hide their traffic. If you’re using meek with meek-reflect.appspot.com, you’ll find it’s been shut down. If all of this is gibberish to you, read on for a breakdown.

meek is a clever piece of software. Imagine that you wanted to communicate with the Tor anonymizing network, but that you didn’t want anyone to know that you were. Maybe you live in a country where a firewall prevents you from accessing the full Web, and blocks Tor entry nodes as part of their Great Firewall. You’d want to send traffic somewhere innocuous first, and then bounce it over to Tor, in order to communicate freely.

That’s what meek does, but it goes one step further. The reflector server is hosted using the same content-delivery network (CDN) as a popular service, say Google’s search engine. The CDN has an IP address, like every other computer on the Internet, but it delivers content for any of the various services it hosts. Traffic to the CDN, encrypted with TLS, looks the same whether it’s going to the meek reflector or to Google, so nobody on the outside can tell whether it is a search query or packets destined for Tor. Inside the CDN, it’s unencrypted and passed along to the reflector.

Anyway, meek was invented to help bring the uncensored Internet to people who live in oppressive regimes, and now cybersecurity researchers have observed it being used by Russian state hackers to hide their tracks. Sigh. Technology doesn’t know which side it’s on — the same backdoor that the FBI wants to plant in all our communications can be used by the mafia just as easily. Plugins that are meant to bring people freedom of speech can just as easily be used to hide the actions of nation-state hackers.

What a strange world we live in.

Packet Trace Anonymization With PktAnon

July 11, 2008 by 5 Comments


If you’re a network researcher or systems administrator, you know that network traces are often necessary, but not easy to share with colleagues and other researchers. To help with both ease of use and handling of sensitive information, the Institute of Telematics has developed PktAnon, a framework that anonymizes network traffic.

It works by using a profile-based scheme that supports various anonymization primitives, making it easy to switch between different network protocols and anonymization methods. New primitives can easily be added, and several pre-defined profiles are bundled into the distro. The profiles are all XML-based.

Essentially, there are two major uses for network traces: anonymizing user traffic in order to research it, and anonymizing in-house usage, thus preventing the leakage of sensitive information. It’s a rather rigid scheme, but using profiles for this was a stroke of genius that made it a lot easier, more flexible, and as a result, more useful and powerful.

[via TaoSecurity]
[photo: mlpoulter]

Anti-paparazzi Sunglasses

June 27, 2008 by 27 Comments

UPDATE: Video can also be found here.

Ah, the life of the work-a-day hacker: sure, it’s glamorous, but all the paparazzi dogging your every step can get unbearably stressful. Thankfully, you have a recourse with these anti-paparazzi sunglasses. They work by mounting two small infrared lights on the front. The wearer is completely inconspicuous to the human eye, but cameras only see a big white blur where your face should be.

Building them is a snap: just take a pair of sunglasses, attach two small but powerful IR LEDS to two pairs of wires, one wire per LED. Then attach the LEDs to the glasses; the video suggests making a hole in the rim of the glasses to embed the LEDs. Glue or otherwise affix the wires to the temples of the glasses. At the end of the temples, attach lithium batteries. They should make contact with the black wire, but the red wires should be left suspended near the batteries without making contact. When you put them on the red wire makes contact, turning the lights on. It’s functional, but we’re thinking that installing an on/off switch would be more elegant and it would allow you to wear them without depleting the batteries.

[via BoingBoing]

Anonymizing Clothing

June 17, 2008 by 8 Comments


Though much of [citizenFinerran]’s intent in designing a suit that camouflages the wearer from security camera footage was philosophical, it is designed with a very tangible purpose in mind. The suit does not provide true camouflage (to say nothing of true invisibility), but it does create enough moving visual obstructions to make the wearer completely anonymous on film. More details on this and other invisibility cloaks after the break.

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