On 2016-12-16 22:06, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
Hi,
[email protected] writes:
Hi. Whonix [0] dev here.
Welcome to Freenet! :)
We are looking for a censorship-resistant and decentralized way to
communicate notifications about critical situations [1] to our users
and
host the project metadata and files themselves to resist a Permanent
Takedown Attack threat.[2]
That is great!
Freenet meets our needs perfectly but
unfortunately as documented it cannot work over Tor. If this changes
in
the short term we will be able to ship it in our distro to a userbase
of
15K users by conservative estimates.
There is a way to route connections over Tor, but it isn’t tested
regularly and currently only works in friend-to-friend mode. For
details
see:
http://127.0.0.1:8888/freenet:USK@ED3bT6ngiUE1RayB9N~aQz6iIrc4Gwj-ubnaw22s~aY,kN3gtmcb9pHa2FKrVPw1U5209WvB7vvuQ7oC42gt6ic,AQACAAE/wats-dieh/17/freenet-over-tor.html
While a neat workaround unfortunately its days are numbered. The
upstream development of onioncat is dead and with the Tor project's
upgrading of the Hidden Service crypto (within the upcoming year)
onioncat will no longer function. We also don't want every user to run a
Hidden Service by default since some deanonymization attacks become
easier to do.
I do not doubt Freenet's anonymity capabilities. You should be proud of
the fact that you got the NSA's attention. However for this to work we
need it to run for all our users out of the box and a number of them
live behind state firewalls that block Freenet and Tor without bridges.
So without a solution that is compatible with Tor, it won't be enough -
an emergency notification system is of little use if it works for some
users some of the time.
Another point is that even in "free" societies the police are convincing
the courts to give them warrants with fraudulent data to raid people
running Freenet. A couple of high coverage arrests are enough to scare
away a number of people. While running nodes over Tor with TCP support
is not optimal for Freenet network performance, it is still to your
advantage than not having those nodes run at all?
I am not conceited to assume that your priorities are planned around our
wishlist. I also understand that building an alternative transport is a
major task. If it wasn't for this obstacle we could immediately use
Freenet for our purposes. Thank you for the work you have put into
creating a better internet.
You could provide several tor-enabled freenet nodes and pre-configure
the nodes of users to connect to you. Doing this to scale would require
you to devise a way to receive the freenet references of people who run
Whonix.
However Freenet does not need Tor as anonymizer (and would reduce its
theoretical reachable security if it used it). Instead it has its own
routing algorithm which profits from the relaxed requirements of a
distributed storage network as opposed to the realtime routing tor
needs
to do. Therefore I’d suggest simply connecting to Freenet opennet.
The only people for whom this can reduce the security compared to tor
are those who currently use tor with secret bridges and pluggable
transports. These could configure Freenet to use the friend-to-friend
mode over Tor, or even a separate darknet. But that would be more
effort
to set up.
You could build a small tor hidden service where people could submit
their noderefs (or where a tool could do that automatically) and have
these added automatically on your project-run nodes (for example
distributed among them over a Freenet site and snarfed from that by
supporters nodes). This does not exist yet, though.
Other points:
* pyFreenet is very convenient in communicating with Freenet with
scripts. Is there a similar mechanism that we can use to customize
node
settings?
You can start with customizing the settings before launching the node,
as it is done in spawn:
https://github.com/ArneBab/lib-pyFreenet-staging/blob/py3/freenet3/spawn.py#L23
Also you can modify the configuration from pyFreenet but I did not test
that in a long time:
https://github.com/ArneBab/lib-pyFreenet-staging/blob/py3/fcp3/node.py#L1132
See also: https://wiki.freenetproject.org/FCPv2/ModifyConfig
Good to know. Thanks.
You can have a look at my work with auto-spawning of Freenet nodes in
fcpupload and babcom. See
http://www.draketo.de/light/english/freenet/pyfreenet-041-autospawn
In short:
fcpupload --spawn --fcpPort 9486 testfile
^ spawn a node, uploads testfile into Freenet. Provides the key to the
file when the upload finishes and tears down the node again.
I did not yet integrate the same into fcpget, but that’s a matter of a
few hours free creative time (so I think I’d be able to provide it
before the end of the first week of january, if you need it).
auto-spawning currently downloads Freenet over the internet,
though. Doing this download over Tor shouldn’t be hard. In fact it just
requires setting the proxy:
## python3
import requests
proxies = {
'http': 'socks5://localhost:9150',
'https': 'socks5://localhost:9150'
}
url = 'http://httpbin.org/ip'
print(requests.get(url, proxies=proxies).text)
Does that happen when updating Freenet?
* Before including pyFreenet we would need it to be signed by its
respective dev so we can validate it before running anything of
course.
I’m the current maintainer. Do you need gpg signed git revisions or
tags, signed release tarballs or signed Mercurial commits?
Ideally we need a signed deb
* We would prefer if you run a package repo so we can easily pull your
software for Whonix image builds.
Tell me how I can easily integrate that into my release process and
I can do that.
pyFreenet consist purely of Python packages, without need of
compilation
steps.
I understand. We can't rely on pip because it lacks GPG support. Please
also consider providing Freenet in signed .deb form so we can easily
provide that package via our repos.
Debian reprepo tool works nicely for packaging and really helpful
upstream that can be contacted by mail.
https://mirrorer.alioth.debian.org/
It can also be scripted once Debian packaging is done. Note that we
don't have experience with packaging anything-java - We can certainly
help with write some bash scripts to automate reprepro Debian repository
creation.
[0] Whonix is an anonymous Debian based OS (whonix.org)
[1] Apt CVE-2016-1252: During apt-get upgrading signature verification
can be
tricked resulting in arbitrary package installation, system
compromise.
We would have liked a way to notify users to avoid running apt
entirely
and instead the necessary manual steps to download/verify the patched
binaries.
[2] https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Dev/Permanent_Takedown_Attack_Defender
It’s great to see you tackle this thoroughly!
Best wishes,
Arne
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