RunningWithBulls.com - The curse of Sanfermin

With the new legislation on Data Retention being past by the European Union, alot of people will be worried about what is actually being recorded, and for how long.

The big problem is that, well no-one knows yet, neither the lawmakers (particularly in Ireland as the time limit can be 6 months to 2 years), or the industry given the onerous task of implementing the recording (without any guidance, or financial input by the government).

As a net user, you have some power to protect yourself, and your Intenet based traffic.

1. Protect your VoIP traffic.

This is a new(ish) technology and there are not too many possibilities.

This morning on Boing Boing, I came across a story about Phil Zimmermann, Mr. PGP, and his new project: Zfone.

Zimmermann describes Zfone as:

In the future, the Zfone protocol will be integrated into standalone secure VoIP clients, but today we have a software product that lets you turn your existing VoIP client into a secure phone. The current Zfone software runs in the Internet Protocol stack on any Windows XP, Mac OS X, or Linux PC, and intercepts and filters all the VoIP packets as they go in and out of the machine, and secures the call on the fly. You can use a variety of different software VoIP clients to make a VoIP call. The Zfone software detects when the call starts, and initiates a cryptographic key agreement between the two parties, and then proceeds to encrypt and decrypt the voice packets on the fly. It has its own little separate GUI, telling the user if the call is secure. It’s as if Zfone were a “bump on the cord”, sitting between the VoIP client and the Internet. Think of it as a software bump-on-the-cord. Maybe a bump in the protocol stack.

“This new protocol has been submitted to the IETF as a proposal for a public standard, to enable interoperability of SIP endpoints from different vendors.”

Currently Zfone has been tested with these VoIP clients and VoIP services:
VoIP clients: X-Lite, Gizmo, and SJphone.
VoIP service providers: Free World Dialup, iptel.org, and SIPphone.

At the moment Zfone is available for Mac and Linux, but not Windows yet. “The Windows XP version will be available in mid-April. We’ll update this page when we have the Windows version ready.”

It is end-to-end encryption, which will require the other side of your conversation to install Zfone also. Which is a pity, but for those who really want end-to-end security, it is a small price to pay.

If Zfone could be built into SIP, or as an add-on feature for ATA devices, VoIP telephone handset users could also use it, for example, like the home users of Blueface

2. Encrypt your Web traffic.

Use Tor

Tor is:

“Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.”

Tor does not give end-to-end encryption.

“Tor does provide a partial solution in a very specific situation, though. When you make a connection to a destination that also runs a Tor server, Tor will automatically extend your circuit so you exit from that circuit. So for example if Indymedia ran a Tor server on the same IP address as their website, people using Tor to get to the Indymedia website would automatically exit from their Tor server, thus getting *better* encryption and authentication properties than just browsing there the normal way.”

But Tor goes along way to making it harder to track your web traffic.

3. Use OTR to encrypt your IM traffic.

Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging allows you to have private conversations over instant messaging by providing:

Encryption

No one else can read your instant messages.

Authentication

You are assured the correspondent is who you think it is.

Deniability

The messages you send do not have digital signatures that are checkable by a third party. Anyone can forge messages after a conversation to make them look like they came from you. However, during a conversation, your correspondent is assured the messages he sees are authentic and unmodified.

Perfect forward secrecy

If you lose control of your private keys, no previous conversation is compromised.

As these laws are applied, lets hope the amount of new privacy tools increases.

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