Distributions
Whonix for anonymity
Creating a distribution for anonymity on the internet has its challenges. But it's important, especially for those living under repressive regimes. Getting the details right is clearly an overriding concern, which is why distributions of this kind tend to turn to Tor to provide that anonymity. But, Tor alone does not necessarily insulate users from disclosing personally identifiable information.
We looked at The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails)—a Tor-based live distribution—back in April 2011. But, regular applications or malware on a Tails system can potentially leak some information (e.g. IP address) that might be used to make a link between the user and their internet activity. The new Whonix distribution, which released an alpha version on October 9, uses virtualization to isolate the Tor gateway from the rest of the system, in part to eliminate those kinds of leaks.
Whonix is based on Debian and VirtualBox. It creates two separate virtual machines (VMs), one that runs all of the applications, and another that acts as a Tor gateway. All of the network traffic from the application VM (which is called the Whonix-Workstation) is routed through the Whonix-Gateway VM. That means the only network access available to applications is anonymized by Tor.
That setup has a number of benefits. For one, malware running on the Whonix-Workstation has no visibility into the actual configuration of the underlying system, so things like IP address, MAC address, hardware serial numbers, and the like, are all hidden. In addition, Whonix can be used in a physically isolated way, where the Workstation and Gateway run on two separate machines. It isn't only Linux that can be protected with Whonix, either, as Windows or other operating systems can be installed as the Whonix-Workstation.
The iptables rules on the workstation redirect all traffic to the gateway and disallow any local network connections. In addition, the firewall on the gateway fails "closed", disallowing any connections if Tor fails. Whonix also configures the system and various applications to reduce or eliminate information leaks. That includes using UTC for the time zone, having the same desktop resolution, color depth, and installed fonts on all installations, and setting the same virtual MAC address on all workstations. The user on Whonix is "user" and applications like GPG are configured to not leak operating system version information
As envisioned, Whonix is a framework that is "agnostic about
everything
",
including using alternatives for the anonymized network (e.g. JonDo,
freenet), virtualization
mechanism (e.g. KVM, Xen, VMWare), and host and guest
operating systems (e.g. Windows, *BSD). Any of those pieces can be swapped
out "with some
development effort
", but the developers are concentrating on the
Debian/VirtualBox/Tor combination, at least currently.
Isolating applications in a single VM does not protect against all anonymity-piercing attacks. Malware can (and does) send the contents of files to remote hosts, which can, obviously, provide personally identifiable information. The Whonix documentation suggests using multiple workstation VMs, one for each type of activity. That idea is, in some ways, similar to the concept behind Qubes, another virtualization-based security-oriented operating system.
The security of Whonix is obviously dependent on its constituent parts,
including the Linux kernel, VirtualBox, and Tor itself, but it also depends
on how the system has been put together as well. It is perhaps not
a surprise that the developer behind Whonix is pseudonymous,
"adrelanos", but he or she seems keenly aware that vetting of Whonix is
required before users can potentially put their lives at risk by using it. The
release announcement says: "I hope skilled people look into the
concept and
implementation and fail to find anonymity related bugs.
" As with
most (all?) projects, Whonix is also looking for more developers to work on it.
The project does come with an extensive Security document that covers the technology behind Whonix, its advantages and disadvantages, threat model, best practices, and so on. It also has an in-depth comparison of Whonix with Tails and the Tor Browser Bundle, which is a browser configured to use Tor and to avoid leaking identifiable information. Whonix is an ambitious project that overlaps with Tails to some extent (though there is an extensive justification for having separate projects), but the projects do collaborate, which bodes well for both.
Brief items
Distribution quotes of the week
NetBSD 6.0
The NetBSD Project has announced NetBSD 6.0. "Changes from the previous release include scalability improvements on multi-core systems, many new and updated device drivers, Xen and MIPS port improvements, and brand new features such as a new packet filter."
OpenELEC 2.0 the embedded XBMC distribution released
OpenELEC is an embedded Linux distribution that aims to allow people to use their Home Theatre PC in the same manner as any other device attached to your TV. "OpenELEC 2.0 is the first stable Distribution ever, that includes direct XVBA (X-Video Bitstream Acceleration) support for XBMC. The advantages introduced by this implementation are enormous. It is now possible on AMD Systems with integrated UVD (Unified Video Decoder) to playback every H.264 and VC-1 encoded content directly. This reduces CPU usage drastically."
Distribution News
openSUSE
openSUSE 11.4 EOL
openSUSE 11.4 will no longer be maintained after November 5, 2012. "However, the community Evergreen team plans to provide ongoing maintenance for openSUSE 11.4. More details on this will be published when they are known."
Newsletters and articles of interest
Distribution newsletters
- Debian Project News (October 15)
- DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 478 (October 15)
- Maemo Weekly News (October 15)
- Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 287 (October 14)
Fedora is retiring Smolt hardware census (The H)
The H reports on Fedora's plan to retire the smolt hardware census on November 7. "A page on the Fedora wiki dealing with the program's retirement lists several reasons for the decision. It seems that the information collected from the program was not as useful as the developers had hoped. Since the data resulted from an opt-in process, it was always skewed and could not be used to generalise about the distribution's install base. Added to this was the fact that the software had not been maintained for a while and does not work on RHEL 6. It is clear, from the wiki, that the Fedora development team have decided to change their approach to collecting data about their install base."
Mandriva Foundation gets a name (The H)
The H reports that the foundation governing Mandriva's community distribution will be called OpenMandriva. The name of the distribution will be chosen by the community once the OpenMandriva foundation has been set up and formally takes over from Mandriva SA.The story of Nokia MeeGo (TaskuMuro)
TaskuMuro has a lengthy history of Maemo and MeeGo, translated from the Finnish version at Muropaketti. It looks at the various devices Nokia created, starting with N770 in 2005 and continues through the concept devices that were under development up until Nokia pulled the plug on MeeGo. "The Harmattan UI was originally based on the Activity Theory principle, a frame of reference for studying human behavior and development processes. The goal is to understand society, personality and, most importantly, how these two are connected. The theory was originally developed by the Russian psychologist Vygotsky. [...] The aim was to utilize information on how people combine tasks and communicate with each other, and thus support these ways of working instead of forcing people to adopt technology-based working models. The system would adapt to the way the user interacts eith it, to ensure reciprocated interaction." (Thanks to Jussi Saarinen.)
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