/ Cory Doctorow / 10:46 am Thu Jun 5, 2008

Little Brother's ParanoidLinux now under development

Iain sends word of the ParanoidLinux project, inspired by the Linux distro used by the freedom fighters in my novel, Little Brother:
Paranoid Linux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of "chaff" communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing anything covert. So while you're receiving a political message one character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack. ~Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, 2008)

When those words were written, ParanoidLinux was just a fiction. It is our goal to make this a reality. The project officially started on May 14th, and has been growing ever since. We welcome your ideas, contributions, designs, or code. You can find us on freenode's irc server in the #paranoidlinux channel. Hope to see you there!

Link (Thanks, Iain!)

44

  1. thats sweet as hell, i know i wanna get a copy of that when it comes out! little brother is the best :)

  2. so how many “front doors”, “vestibules” and “antechambers” have you set up to sort and sanitize your contributors?

  6. Is this going to be based on Incogneto? I’ve been wanting a version of that that I could install on my hdd instead of having to run it from a usb stick…

  10. Well. I don’t want to rain on the parade, but there is an inherent problem with making a system “absolutely” anonymous and secure. The more security measures you take, the more unusable your system becomes. Freenet project is a good illustration of this principle, being one of the most secure anonymous networks around, but at the time being slow close to unusability due to the overhead. Yes, catch open wireless, switch between access points every few seconds, use anonymizers like TOR and high grade encryption and now you have nearly untraceable, extremely secure and completely unusable connection.

  11. Pretty cool, but so far I’m not convinced the government is spying on me. However, I’d be down with an OS that keeps my ISP from doing stupid things like sniffing packets, traffic shaping and the like.

  12. The idea of performing sensitive communications “low and slow” to avoid detection amongst a lot of noise has one big flaw:

    Machines are very very good at spotting that kind of thing. Except for signatures, flow patterns are the easiest way to spot traffic.

    One in every 500 bytes means nothing when those bytes are each in their own packets, all from sources either more random or less random sources than the noise traffic. If it’s every 500 bytes, that recognizable period alone gives it away.

    You can’t reliably send raw bytes over the wire (no packet encapsulation) or in the middle of other packets (you’ll get bad checksums, and how do you route them to the real destination?)

    I guess you could somehow mix it with the noise higher up than the transport layer, but to get it to the right place, you’d need to send it all to a proxy or network that would separate it out. Those resources could be easily recognized and watched.

  14. ok, so it won’t let me post open and close tags. Anyway it says ghref, rather than href.

  15. Just what we need, more chatroom bots… I wonder how long it would take your oppressive government to download “Paranoid Linux,” make note of its own distinctive signatures – like predictable chatroom bot behavior.

  16. enochrewt – just use TOR and encrypted bittorrent. If your ISP can’t analyze the content, they can’t filter based on it. All they can do is filter based on well known ports/IPs, and TOR/BT randomizes those.

    In fact, using TOR to the BT tracker and BT encryption to the peers is pretty soild.

  17. Great, now where can I score a free XBox universal?

    p.s. Thanks C.D. for the enjoyable and clearly inspiring, even visionary book. Best one I have read in quite some time.

  19. R F I D
    Please examine yourself for blown riffids
    where the wire is blown from cover
    by fields of scanner
    faint odor of circuit board potting
    wafts from the bands of overheated undies
    by a strength of what you cannot see
    and will not be told
    the secret scanner
    wire that owns you, your passport to unitary identity
    popped like a kernel and sopping up spice
    ‘would you like a little butter on your ass swab?’
    ‘bend over to pass through the gate’
    blown by puffs
    nudged by morning headline suggests what you say
    and you say it certainly, strung on a wire
    filament of fidelity, surge of success
    belief of assertion assertion of belief

    please examine yourself for blown riffids
    no, really, pat yourself down, in place,
    ask your neighbor to pat you down
    it’s a pleasure among the community of patsies
    feel for the little snags of wire, that itchy spot
    inflamed like an ingrown hair
    opaque like the wire through new mint money
    Do Not – put your friends in the microwave oven

  20. This is great news! Now combine this idea with the recently mentioned EE-Linux (for micro laptops w/ the Atom CPU), and heavily encrypt every single packet, whether it’s IM, VOIP, or HTTP requests. Every single packet has to be encrypted, and the path and end-points have to be randomized, on a random schedule, similar to TOR.

    I would love to see this become a global, FOSS project, such that we can get the best and brightest working on it. This is no trivial or optional goal, either – we’re almost to the point where every single thing we do, when “touching the Matrix”, is analysed.

    Switzerland just announced that they’ll be inspecting every single packet that passes through their switches. We don’t have an hour to waste on this idea!

  21. +1 to #11. I strongly suggest that the ParanoidLinux maintainers get deeply, intimately familiar with how traffic analysis works. This presentation from last year’s Black Hat Briefings is a good start — the panel included Jon Callas of PGP and Nick Mathewson from Tor, and they know what the hell they’re talking about. George Danezis’ “Introducing Traffic Analysis”, mentioned in the presentation, should be required reading for everyone on the Paranoid Linux project.

  22. Great, I thought it was real, I spent a long time looking on the web for it and didn’t find a thing.

  24. Interesting initiative, but it’s not going to be much good to, for example, a Chinese dissident. The Chinese government doesn’t need an awful lot of “evidence” to get you arrested and possibly convicted; the sheer fact that you’re using or even downloading specific software is enough.

    And then, they don’t even need a legal conviction to get you fired and harrassed.

  25. @#20
    Unfortunately, it looks like Anonym.OS is a dead project, and with outdated configs which prevent one from connecting to the Internets.

  26. I’m so happy this has taken off. I too, went and Googled paranoidlinux when i was reading the book.

  27. Allright, so now the only piece of actual “science fiction” left in the book is the dot-com-onomic Xbox Ultimate. We just need to convince Microsoft that loss-leading is all the same no mater how much or little you ask the customers to pay.

  28. This sounds reminiscent of Tinfoi Hat Linux which is inspired by the Cryptonomicon novel from Neal Stephenson. At least for the parts about morse-blinking the scroll lock LED and the TEMPEST prevention thing.

    http://tinfoilhat.shmoo.com/

  33. “I might be movin’ to Montana soon
    Just to raise me up a crop of Dental Floss Raisin’ it up
    Waxen it down
    In a little white box
    I can sell uptown
    By myself I wouldn’t
    Have no boss,
    But I’d be raisin’ my lonely Dental Floss”

  40. Im working on a verson that also encrypts ever bit of data. look for the alfha on torrent in august.

  44. make it so the thing can be programmed to look like its doing do specific tasks like certain educational sites or math sites. My computer lab teacher has this vision software that lets her stop, control, and view what were doin. thanx alot email me the date its comin out.

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