Anonymity on the net -- JAP/Jondo, Tor and usage tracking
Hey there everybody,
I'm a noob here, and a friend of cannabis forum member Apollonia. She encouraged me to post some information I put together that may be useful to people who are interested in increasing their anonymity online. For my part my goal is to explain some dark corners and to create a discussion space on the subjects of JonDo, Tor and internet tracking. I break the initial discussion into five posts as follows:
*Introduction
*Online Anonymity - what it is & how to obtain it
*tcp/ip networking and internet communications - a brief tutorial
**IP
**TCP
*Comparison of JonDo/Tor
*How JonDo works: proxies, cascades, logs & international servers
*Necessary additional steps to ensure real security - email
anonymity, your information, JondoFox/browsers, encryption
At the start, please let me be clear that I am in no way advocating use of any of these services -- I am a JonDo user who is open-minded and interested in learning and sharing information. If someone can show me that Tor is superior, I will be happy because I will then be more secure :-). In any event, I hope you enjoy...
Anonymity on the net -- JAP/Jondo, Tor and usage tracking
Hi there. If you've come here its probably because you want to learn about how to be anonymous while browsing the web, posting to forums, purchasing from online stores and checking internet email accounts. My goal here will be to give you as much information as I can relating to these issues and to facilitate discussion so that we can all become better at protecting our privacy online.
As of this writing (10/09), JAP/JonDo and Tor are the two best open source anonymity services.
JAP/JonDo is a project that is a cooperative effort between JonDos Company and universities TU Dresden and University of Regensburg in Germany. Their philosophy, which they seem to take very seriously, is to provide tools for true privacy and anonymity and that mistrust is better than trust in this regard. Their method for promoting this philosophy is to make the tools they develop and the mix operators that provide bandwidth to customers as open and transparent as possible. The software is open source and the proxies or mix cascade operators (the servers your traffic will flow through) are known organizations that you can examine for their policies and history upholding privacy rights etc. Here is a link to their main page: https://www.jondos.de/en/
Tor is a not for profit company based in Massachusetts that does research and development into online anonymity and supports the Tor project. They are an excellent group committed to privacy and anonymity. An overview of Tor can be found here: Tor: Overview.
Later posts will examine JAP/JonDo in greater detail as well as compare with Tor, pros and cons of both services. In this regard, here are some links to discussions of these services that may spur discussion here:
Schneier on Security: Anonymity and the Tor Network
Report release: 2007 Circumvention Landscape Report: Methods, Uses, and Tools | Berkman Center
I'm not going to discuss Anyonymizer or any other non-open source/non-freeware software products as I don't really feel they are that secure -- if LE wants my surfing data, I don't trust some corporation (especially US corps like Abraxas who owns Anonymizer) to protect me. If someone wants to include anecdotes about such products, please feel free, but I'd rather not devote much threadspace to them.
Its important to be clear up front as to what these services do and don't do. What they do is ensure that
your IP address will not be exposed to web servers you visit via http communications. They do not prevent you
from identifying yourself manually to web servers by using your name or other identifying details in communications
to that server. A later post will discuss TCP/IP and HTTP in order to clarify what all of this means. For now
its safe to say that using JAP/JonDo or Tor along with certain 'best practices' can truly hide you from friggin echelon/TIA big brother shit and of course, LE.
So... I'm creating this thread to discuss use of anonymity services and best practices and to invite anyone to ask questions, correct my mistakes (I'd love to learn something too!), and generally share knowledge on this subject in a thoughtful and open way. A little about myself -- I'm a hydro enthusiast, computer software engineer, libertarian/socialist, animal loving, music loving dirty hippy. I've been following privacy and civil rights issues from a computer/technology perspective for almost a decade now. The most active and organized group in this regard (in the USA) is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, based in San Francisco, USA. In later posts I will provide some links to EFF privacy articles that are on point to this discussion below, but I wholeheartedly recommend you familiarize yourself with their work as it is of the utmost importance to free speech and privacy rights in the United States and around the world.
Anonymity on the net -- JAP/Jondo, Tor and usage tracking
The general idea behind internet/email anonymity is to avoid unintentionally giving out any information that would identify you to vendors, law enforcement and any others who have the desire to monitor your internet usage. This is a layered effort in that there are many ways you can be identified over the internet via a web browser. If you share your:
1. local gateway IP address*
2. identity via credit card, name/address, paypal, ss#, or any other piece of personal info
3. identity via an email address that can be linked to you you will have lost anonymity for that communication.
In addition, there are numerous tracking cookies that websites and advertising companies use to track your internet usage. This link gives some best practices that are very useful -- Six Tips to Protect Your Search Privacy | Electronic Frontier Foundation. Its part one of a series by EFF on tracking. Part two is more meaty as it describes the little-known use of adobe/macromedia flash plugin** to store cookie-like data when cookies are disabled in order to track users. It also discusses internet usage tracking and use of social networking sites to link that usage data to an individual person (meaning you... and yes, facebook, linkedin, etc. are whores) -- https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/0...nd-remove-wide.
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*note this means the IP address internet websites see -- not the IP address of the local machine you are working on, but the IP address of the hardware you use to connect to your ISP. For example, I use a cable modem, so my cable company sees my network only to the level of the IP they assign to my gateway, which is my cable modem IP address, a/k/a gateway address. My local machine has an address like 10.1.1.6, which is a private IP address assigned by my wireless router with the subnet that is my home network (10, 172 and 192 prefixes are reserved for private subnetworks like your home network). This address is perfectly useless to identify me online as it only has meaning relative to my little subnet context. It is undoubtedly possible to obtain someone's gateway IP that is using JonDo or Tor via hacking using javascript or possibly some form of overflow attack. However, the latter is rare, and if you run "noscript" or any other plugin that turns off javascript until you enable it for each internet site/domain it should help protect against such attacks. Additionally, never use internet explorer -- run firefox on a pc, linux or mac using the jondofox profile, (available at JonDo download site: https://www.jondos.de/en/) for your anonymous surfing) which installs the
'noscript' firefox plugin, should go a long way to protect you.
**the short version is that you can turn off/be asked permission prior to any 3rd-party data-storing by using the flash settings panel at: Adobe - Flash Player : Flash Player Help settings_manager04.html, though its advisable to read the full piece anyway, and also read this link from part two: https://www.isecpartners.com/files/i...er_Cookies.pdf. A later post will discuss how to best administer flash policies on your computer to avoid tracking.
Anonymity on the net -- JAP/Jondo, Tor and usage tracking
I realize that some people have very limited understanding of tcp/ip networking and internet communications so here I will provide a brief tutorial.
IP
All computers on an IP ("internet protocol") network must have a unique address assigned to them. This address (of the form 111.222.333.444) identifies your network, and the first two "quads" of the number identify your "subnet". I am simplifying a bit, but the gritty details are not important for the level of understanding we need to grock jondo/tor. IP addresses are assigned on a request-basis by a "dhcp" server. If you have a router at home you can connect multiple computers to, it has a dhcp server to assign those computers IP addresses.
Every url ("uniform resource locator", for example: ass.com takes you where you want to go) is really a front for an IP address. When you type www.assahola.com in a browser, this "request" is passed to your ISP's domain name server ("DNS") that tries to perform a match of www.assahola.com to an IP address. If it can't find it, it talks to other DNS's to find it. If it can't you get one of those 'The requested URL could not be retrieved' messages. If it does find the IP, you then can connect to the IP address.
Earlier I mentioned private IP addresses. These reserved subnets (10, 172, 192) can never be used as internet addresses -- they are only useful within a local network, which you can think of as a sort of cul-de-sac hanging off of the internet. My machine now has IP 10.1.1.6, but there are probably thousands if not millions of computers that have that address, but they are all behind a gateway that blocks me from connecting to them directly. There is no way to locate that private IP address on the internet. The only way I can talk to a computer that is inside a local/private/sub network is through its gateway, and only if that computer talks to me first -- it has no internet presence that I can contact, (unless you configure your router to forward requests to a certain local computer called port forwarding -- but that is getting deeper than we need to go here).
Each subnet or local network has a gateway that connects it to another network. A gateway is often a router, but can be a computer running some software (which is what a router is anyway). Unlike most computers, each gateway has two IP addresses. One IP address is for the local network, and the other IP identifies it as part of another network. My local gateway has the address 10.1.1.1, but from the internet "side" of the gateway the IP is assigned by my ISP and is outside my control. If I go to What's My IP Address? Networking Tools & More, it is reporting my IP as 80.237.191.141. That would normally be the internet "side" of my gateway's IP address as assigned by my ISP, and I would have just sacrificed my anonymity to this forum if it were. In this case however, I am running JonDo, so the IP it reports as mine (my gateway's) is really the IP of the last server in the JonDo cascade I am connected to. I am anonymous. Sweet.
TCP
The TCP portion of tcp/ip stands for "transmission control protocol". TCP runs "on top of" IP, in a layered fashion, which is the basic underlying design of current network protocol combinations, or stacks. For example, you may run a wireless network based on the 802.11 wireless protocol. That protocol runs "beneath" IP, so our laying looks like 802.11/IP/TCP/...., where "...." stands for any 3rd-party application that uses network communications, such as a bit-torrent client or web browser. A web browser uses HTTP ("hyper-text transfer protocol") on top of TCP, so its stack on an ethernet wired network would be ethernet/IP/TCP/HTTP. TCP is a very powerful protocol, whereas IP is much simpler. IP provides no way to make sure the data "packets" you send as part of a network communication actually arrive whole, nor does it specify the ordering of the data that is received on an IP connection. TCP handles all of that, plus some other goodies like retransmission of lost IP packets. IP packets are the data you send around the internet to do things, like buy something or visit a website. IP takes the data you are sending, such as a form you submit for your taxes or something, and breaks it up into packets. Each packet travels across the internet to its final destination -- but the important thing here is that each packet takes its own route to get where its going. If there are a million packets it is possible that they take a million different routes to the destination. This means that they won't necessarily all arrive in order, or arrive at all. TCP handles that, by requesting retransmission of data packets that are not receieved and by ordering them correctly when they do arrive. As the data is reassembled by TCP it can be passed off to the next higher layer in the protocol stack -- http for internet traffic. So that is tcp/ip in a very small nutshell. Here is a link to w3schools tcp/ip primer: TCP/IP Tutorial that may have some further info if you want to dig deeper, and wikipedia is quite good for this sort of stuff.
The key thing is to understand your gateway IP, as this is the identifying address you don't want a website you visit to know.
Anonymity on the net -- JAP/Jondo, Tor and usage tracking
I do not want to start a flame war or anything here. This is my personal opinion and is subject to change at any time. The idea is to present a point of view (happens to be my current one) as a pretext for discussion about the pros and cons of Jondo vs. Tor. Also, let me clearly state that both services are free services with the exception that JonDo allows access to faster mixes with a pay option. The "slow" Jondo mixes are very usable (I used them myself for many months) and everything I write here applies equally well to them as to the "premium" JonDo mix cascades.
I personally chose JonDo over Tor because with JonDo the user may obtain the identity, location, log policies and privacy laws of the servers (relays in Tor-speak) and countries in a particular cascade (don't fret if you don't understand all this yet -- I will expand on cascades below). With Tor, as far as I understand, one can connect to many servers but there is no way to know who controls the servers you connect to, who they are associated with, and the type of logging/data storage they perform. This lack of knowledge made me suspect initially of Tor. Of course, since anyone can be a Tor relay there are many more in existence than for JonDo, so anonymity may be greater; but since they are unknown they could be run by the FBI as far as I know (honeypot anyone?). I may be paranoid, but that doesn't mean no one's after me :). Turns out I'm paranoid and correct -- one of the links I posted above (Schneier on Security: Anonymity and the Tor Network) discusses how a user setup a Tor relay and obtained hundreds of user email accounts and passwords. This is the key weakness with Tor in my opinion -- the last server in the mix has a lot of power and can "sniff" or read any data you are sending to a website that is not encrypted on the server end. Now, one might say the same for JonDo, but with JonDo, I KNOW who is running the final server in the mix. They are various universities, privacy organizations and companies with some extra bandwidth that want to help increase anonymity and perhaps earn a little money for the bandwidth costs; and they all sign a contract with JonDos that enforces a set of security practices -- like not storing traffic logs (of course they must comply with any national data retention laws -- but read my next post for why this is not such an issue and also some good practices to use when running JonDo to make sure your comms are as anonymous as possible).
The other reason I chose JonDo is performance -- with a payment plan (for example 40 Euros for 6.5gb bandwidth) you can achieve quite good performance using JonDo, though it is entirely free by default, if a bit slow. That being said this thread is not intended as a JonDo-only thread -- I think each choice has its pros and cons and so its a decision made best by the individual it effects -- you.
Here is a link to an interesting discussion of Jap vs. Tor on the JAP/JonDo forum: https://www.jondos.de/en/uieforum?c=...&ThreadID=2725
Anonymity on the net -- JAP/Jondo, Tor and usage tracking
The technique behind JonDo and Tor is the use of a proxy or set of proxy computers that sit between your computer and the internet website you wish to connect to. A proxy sounds just like what it is -- these computer stand in your stead and block a web server from seeing your IP. Each of these intermediate servers (there are generally three in a JOnDo cascade) is responsible for taking your request and data and routing thenm through to the next server in the cascade. The last server in the cascade forwards the request on to the recipient (e.g., www.assahola.com). So if I am running JonDo and I've picked a cascade that has servers in Britain, Germany and Spain my request is routed first to Britain, then Germany, then Spain before actually being sent on to google.com. Along the way my request is hidden by these three servers and my location and true IP are hidden from google (though to be truly anonymous I would be sure I am not currently logged into any google services like gmail -- in fact google, yahoo etc. are special cases that we should discuss more thoroughly at some point).
Each hop in the cascade replaces the IP address of the last link of the request, so my IP is replaced three times before it gets to google. If google wants to find out who I am, it would have to obtain info from the last proxy server in the cascade (Spain, the only one it knows about) about who forwarded the request to it, which is the second proxy server in Germany. Then it would need the info on the British proxy server from the Germans, and from them they might obtain my IP address (as the British server is the only one who knows my true IP). Its like one of those terror cells big brother loves to obsess on -- each only knows two others and hence can only give up those two. Now, I don't know the privacy laws in Britain and Spain, but I can find out if I want, and I can also find out what type of information the proxy servers in the cascade store. For example, German law requires that all communications between two IP addresses must be logged by the host, but not the contents of the request. If all three servers were in Germany, and google went to court there to get my identity, they could potentially get the information that I did in fact make the request to google, but not any search terms I used, etc. This is why its so important to have several different countries in a cascade. LE would have to go to each country in the cascade and navigate its privacy laws and courts to find my identity... all for little old me. Doesn't sound likely, and more importantly, it really means you won't be troubled by LE like in the overgrow incident. Foreign countries prefer not to be the subject of dragnet policing methods commenced by other countries (hell, even Canada can't give you up if your proxied through Britain, Germany and Spain). The best thing is to have at least one erver in the cascade that keeps no logs or records at all. This would mean I am even more unidentifiable as one broken link in the chain makes it much more difficult to chase the request back to its source. In fact it still may be done by linking up the requests by time of request, but not with the certainty of a chain of logged communications. In fact, this is why JonDo tells you how many users are currently online using the cascade you have chosen -- the more users on the cascade the harder it will be for LE to link your request back to you over a broken chain using the time of the request (time-overlapping requests from different users are more likely with more users).
So that is Jondo in a nutshell. How best to use JonDo to maintainyour privacy is the subject of the belowdiscussion. In order toexplain this as simply as possible I will describe an internetcommunication performedunsecurely, and then the same one donesecurely using JonDo.
Example (unsecure)
1. I go to google in chrome and type a search for 'hid grow bulbs'. Now google knows that my gateway IP performed this search, which it may log along with my gateway IP that identifies me via my ISP. (Also, if I am logged into any google service at the time of my search google will also have that information to pair with my IP.)
2. I click a link for one of the results, for example http://www.getmesomebudsquickorilldi...ghtingmain.htm, which sends getmesomebudsquickorilldie.com a request for its main lighting html page 'lightingmain.htm'. getmesomebudsquickorilldie now knows my gateway IP and if they are ever raided by law enforcement I can be identified via any logs they keep, along with the easy cooperation of my ISP. Then I go further and actually log into my getmesomebudsquickorilldie account using my account info with them. Now they don't even need my ISP to find out who I am. They have my account info (including my address) and its now linked to my IP, making LE's job that much easier.
Example (secure)
1. I run jondo and run firefox using the jondofox profile (or just configure my browser to use the jondo app as my proxy).
2. I go to google and type a search for 'hid grow bulbs'. The IP address that google logs for my search is the IP of the final server in the cascade, and as long as I am not logged into any google services I am currently anonymous.
3. I click a link for one of the results, for example http://www.getmesomebudsquickorilldi...ghtingmain.htm, which sends getmesomebudsquickorilldie.com a request for its main lighting html page 'lightingmain.htm'. getmesomebudsquickorilldie now also knows the IP of the last server in the cascade. If they are ever raided by law enforcement I am difficult to identify -- first because the http request appears to have come from, for example, Denmark, and two because if they even tried to find out who forwarded the request to the cascade's final server, it will just be another server in, for example, Germany. Then I go further and actually log into my getmesomebudsquickorilldie account using my account info with them. Obviously, if my getmesomebudsquickorilldie account lists my home address then I am not anonymous. That is why you never use your name/home address or any other identifying data in accounts for which you want to keep your identity free. If you have a grow in your house never ever order grow items using your address or credit card -- borrow one from a very good friend and use their address for the delivery.
So as you see, just using Jondo is not enough to keep yourself secure. If you are simply browsing and communicating on marijuana forums, its generally quite easy to use jondo and it keeps you very secure. Just make sure your account name does not idenfity you and you don't enter any personal info (like your main email address***) on your profile screen.
*** This point is key to email privacy -- if you want to use an email account that cannot be linked to you use an internet email provider such as , then CREATE and ACCESS the account only using jondo, never a regular internet connection. If you use an insecure connection just once to access the anonymous email account it can be linked to you. Email programs like outlook are inherently linkable to your IP so they should not be used for anonymous communication.
You may wonder how JonDo allows us to evade Echelon/TIA government snooping. The way it works is that, when we send a web request via jondo, the data that is sent from our computers to the first server in the cascade is encrypted, as is the communication from the first to the second and second to third servers. TIA may be powerful, but it cannot read 128-bit encrypted communications. However, the third server must unencrypt the request before forwarding it on to its destination as the website you are actually communication with would have no way to unencrypt the data. Since the third jondo server is outside the US, its a good bet the request will not flow through the filters of TIA UNLESS the destination website is hosted inside the US! However, even if the final unencrypted leg does flow through TIA, the data it scans appears to be coming from someone else, not you :-). Mwaha. Mwahaha. Mwahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
Okay, so I've laid out the basics, including a few solid links to help iron out some details. Please let me know if anyone has any questions, corrections, ideas, insights or anything even tangentially related to this subject that will enlighten and perhaps even mistify us. Here's to anonymity (and taking a huge hit)!
-LH
Anonymity on the net -- JAP/Jondo, Tor and usage tracking
And one more thing before I drift off -- the base of the issue between jondo and tor, for me, is that unless you can know the location of the servers and who owns them they could all be in one country -- perhaps even the USA. In that case, the nodes are not located in different countries with different privacy laws and systems. They are in one country where there may or may not be real privacy laws. With an international jondo mix, someone that wants to get your surfing data has to navigate many different legal systems which entails quite a lot of effort and political capital for little old you and me. Tor affords no such in-built bureaucratic and cross border static to protect us. Maybe if we were friggin international terrorists trying to bring down the statue of liberty it'd be worth LE's effort, but frankly what most of us discuss here is small beans to LE. Its not just like whipping up a couple information subpoenas and calling your process server. Even assuming LE in all three of the mix countries are easy going and freely provide such info to foreign LE at little inter-agency cost (a pipe dream), many of the countries in the jondo mixes have pretty good security laws and LE may likely not have the option. Its a long winding road of gubmint and legal crap that LE better have a juicy honey pot at the end of or someone has to wash all the egg off their face.
Anonymity on the net -- JAP/Jondo, Tor and usage tracking
Quote:
Originally Posted by larryshomework
And one more thing before I drift off -- the base of the issue between jondo and tor, for me, is that unless you can know the location of the servers and who owns them they could all be in one country -- perhaps even the USA.
Tor is a powerful tool and you can configure all of these settings. The latest versions allow you specify exit by country, the configuration file can exclude or require certain relays in the cascade, the GUI controllers can tell you which relays are in use for what connects, all of what you want. Manually changing these settings may impact your level of anonymity but it would still be superior to JonDo in every sense except maybe speed - especially when you get a slow circuit :)
Besides everyone should be using HTTPS for private data!
Anonymity on the net -- JAP/Jondo, Tor and usage tracking
Quote:
Originally Posted by wintermute7
Tor is a powerful tool and you can configure all of these settings. The latest versions allow you specify exit by country, the configuration file can exclude or require certain relays in the cascade, the GUI controllers can tell you which relays are in use for what connects, all of what you want. Manually changing these settings may impact your level of anonymity but it would still be superior to JonDo in every sense except maybe speed - especially when you get a slow circuit :)
Besides everyone should be using HTTPS for private data!
Hey there wintermute7,
welcome to the thread. What you say sounds intriguing to me -- when you write that you can specify the settings, are you saying you can pick specific relays that you will connect to to form circuits? What can you know about these relays? As regards country of exit, that def sounds cool, but can you see who it is runs the relay? My thinking -- and perhaps this implicates me in an institutional bias, but I don't think so -- is that I want to know as much about the exit nodes I use as I can. Are they used by a lot of people? Who owns them and where are they located/co-located? What kind of organizations are in the mix? Any scammer with a pc can set up a Tor node, and that makes me nervous (as a sometime scammer myself ;-)
I absolutely agree that individuals should use ssl for private data but many users are ignorant of this, and it also begs the question of what exactly is private data? It may be different for each individual. Personally, I don't want anyone to know the items I browse at an online store -- and its easier to figure out who someone is from their internet searches than you might think -- see this link: Lesson From Tor Hack: Anonymity and Privacy Aren't the Same
excerpt:
In any event, you have made me curious enough that I am going to download and play with Tor for a bit.
Anonymity on the net -- JAP/Jondo, Tor and usage tracking
Just wanted to add a thought. I really would like this thread to be for everyone, not just tech types. I fear that often we geeks scare away some who may be "ignorant" but also want to learn more, and they won't ask questions because they are sure someone will jump on them to mock, etc. I did not get into tech to lord it over others. I got into it because its interesting stuff, and I like to learn. I also like to help others learn so here is the deal: anyone out there who has a genuine question about this stuff please post it. There is no such thing as a too dumb question in this thread. And I would ask that anyone who enjoys poking fun at those who know less please refrain from posting this thread.
Anonymity on the net -- JAP/Jondo, Tor and usage tracking
wow very techy stuff you got going here. very interesting at the same time. my friends are always making fun of me because when anyone asks my last name i make a name up. I am very picky about my privacy, so i really like this thread.
I have one question. I did a yahoo search for proxy servers and found a decent one that says it is located in germany. it is called privacy5.com. i have been using this to log onto cannabis.com from my work computer so my boss dont see. i dont understand to much about it other than i go yhis site and tell it what site i want to go to. how private are these sites?
