Open Secure Telephony Network
Posted on February 22, 2012
| lee
Over the last two months, I have been working on a project to research and develop a set of tools to provide secure peer to peer Voice over IP on the Android mobile platform. It is called the Open Secure Telephony Network, or OSTN. This work is done under the umbrella of The Guardian Project.
this is not the type of “open” we mean, and definitely not secure
The project will continue for another four months and I will post my public findings here.
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February 2012: Project Update
Posted on February 9, 2012
| n8fr8
Through coordination with the Tor Project, we released Orbot 1.0.7, which includes an embedded version of OpenSSL to assure we have the latest security enhancements for this critical cryptographic library. In addition, compatibility testing was done on Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and with the latest versions of Firefox Mobile. As always you can learn more and download Orbot in the Android Market and at https://guardianproject.info/apps/orbot
With the public awareness of internet censorship and surveillence growing thanks to SOPA, PIPA and CarrierIQ, not to mention the ongoing unrest in many regions if the world, we have seen a huge spike in interest and download of Orbot, Orweb and Gibberbot.
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Introducing InformaCam
Posted on January 20, 2012
| harlo
These are interesting times, if you go by Times Magazine as an indicator. The magazine’s person of the year for 2011 was The Protester, preceded in 2010 by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Both entities partners with equal stake in freely sharing the digital content that shows the world what’s going on in it, at any time, from behind any pair of eyes.Also casting in their lot with the others is Time Magazine’s 2006 person of the year, You: the You that puts the “you” in “user-generated content;” the You whose miasma of bits, bytes, and the powerful images they express are becoming increasingly problematic.
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Strong Mobile Passwords with Yubikey USB Token
Posted on January 4, 2012
| n8fr8
We have been experimenting with the Yubikey, a USB hardware password token, a bit over the last few weeks and would like to share our initial findings. We have not received any financial support or donation from Yubico for this work. We simply think they have a very affordable, interesting product that, due to its design, does *not* require any on-device driver software and can easily work with any Android device that supports USB Host/HID mode.
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Thoughts on Mobile Video for Activism
Posted on December 22, 2011
| n8fr8
I’ve co-written a blog post with Bryan Nunez of WITNESS, on some important concepts around using mobile video technology within activists and protest situations. It is up now on their blog, but here is a short excerpt:
Activists all over the world have turned to mobile phones to organize, coordinate and document their struggle. Images and videos shot on mobile phones have been the standard for what revolution looks like in the public imagination.
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SQLCipher for Android v1 FINAL!
Posted on November 29, 2011
| n8fr8
Team GP along with the good folks at Zetetic, are happy to announce that we have reached FINAL on our first release (“v1” 0.0.6 build) of SQLCipher for Android. This means we consider this a production release, ready for shipping with your apps to provide for reliable, open-source, secure application data encryption.
If you need a refresher, here is what the cross-platform, open-source SQLCipher provides:
SQLCipher is an SQLite extension that provides transparent 256-bit AES encryption of database files.
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Don’t Get Burned, Anonymize Your Fire
Posted on November 16, 2011
| n8fr8
Thanks to Jesse Vincent, aka @obra of the K-9 mail project, we can say that Orbot (Tor on Android) and Orweb (Privacy Browser) work just fine on the new Amazon Kindle Fire. This means that while everything you do through Amazon’s store and browser are tracked and accounted for by Team Bezos, you can use our apps to more safely and privately access web content through the Tor network. While we are mostly Nook Color fans around here, we know that the Kindle Fire is going to be quite popular this Christmas, and are glad to see that mobile privacy now has a toehold on the device from Seattle.
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Two years in…
Posted on October 25, 2011
| n8fr8
Greetings mobile believers,
I am about to head into the first ever Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference, aka #RightsCon, and though I would post some thoughts about the state of the Guardian Project, and the world in which we operate. RightsCon looks to be an amazing event (live streaming here: https://www.rightscon.org/), by an amazing organization (Access), and it comes at an interesting time in the world, and for our project.
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Progress on Mobile Video Privacy Tools
Posted on September 10, 2011
| n8fr8
If you are a developer you may just want to skip all the prose below, and just jump over to Github to find our new FFMPEG on Android project{.vt-p} and build system. You can also check out our SSCVideoProto Project{.vt-p} to understand how we are using it to redact faces and other identifying areas of HD video right on the Android phone itself. For more context, read on…
Last October at the Open Video Conference 2010, the idea of a camera application that could be designed to understand the needs and requirements of the human rights community was born.
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CACertMan app to address DigiNotar & other bad CA’s
Posted on September 5, 2011
| n8fr8
As I expect many of you are aware, there was a major compromise to a Dutch Certificate Authority named “DigiNotar” recently, where they allowed SSL certs for domains like *.google.com, *.torproject.org and even *.cia.gov as well as *.*.com to be issued.
It was brought up to the contribs of CyanogenMOD that they should probably remove the DigiNotar CA cert from the built-in Android OS keystore (located at /system/etc/security/cacerts.bks). Since they have 500k+ users, and can be more nimble than other ROM/device distributors, it was seen as a way to quickly address the problem, at least within their community.
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ACLU believes “Software Developers Can Put Privacy First!” (and so do we!)
Posted on August 19, 2011
| n8fr8
A bit more on our big win in the Develop4Privacy contest, from Brian Robick at the ACLU of Washington State:
When software developers put privacy first, everybody wins!
Too often, user privacy is an afterthought in the design of computer software and online services. In recent months, social networks have rolled back changes, cell phone manufacturers have altered the way that location tracking data is stored, and most recently, mobile application developers have been caught inappropriately collecting children’s personal data.
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Announcing ObscuraCam v1 – Enhance Your Visual Privacy!
Posted on June 23, 2011
| Derek
We’re very happy to announce the beta release of ObscuraCam for Android. This is the first release from the SecureSmartCam project, a partnership with WITNESS, a leading human rights video advocacy and training organization. This is the result of an open-source development cycle, comprised of multiple sprints (and branches), that took place over the last five months. This “v1” release is just the first step towards the complete vision of the project.
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Lil’ Debi: Easy Installer for Debian on Android
Posted on June 18, 2011
| n8fr8
Have an Android phone and want an easy Debian chroot running it?
Alpha test our new app, Lil’ Debi. It builds up a whole Debian chroot on your phone entirely using debootstrap. You choose the release, mirror, and size of the disk image, and away it goes. It could take up to an hour, then its done. Then it has a simple chroot manager that mounts and unmounts things, and starts/stops sshd if you have it installed.
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Orbot 1.0.5.2 now available
Posted on May 17, 2011
| n8fr8
Our flagship app, Orbot: Tor on Android, has been updated to version 1.0.5.2. It is available in the Android Market, or through direct download from the Tor Project’s website.
This release fixes a number of long standing bigs, includes the latest and greatest release of Tor itself, cleans up the user interface a bit, and adds some new advanced options (you can specify your exit node country!). It also fixes an issue with our “Tor Everything” capability, that allowed some Android system network traffic to leak and bypass the Tor routing.
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Announcing: SQLCipher for Android, Developer Preview r1
Posted on May 9, 2011
| Derek
After some major breakthroughs during last week’s development sprint, we’re extremely excited to announce SQLCipher for Android, Developer Preview r1. SQLCipher is an SQLite extension that provides transparent 256-bit AES encryption of database files. To date, it has been open-sourced, sponsored and maintained by Zetetic LLC, and we are glad to be able to extend their efforts to a new mobile platform. In the mobile space, SQLCipher has enjoyed widespread use in Apple’s iOS, as well as Nokia / QT for quite some time.
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Our Foolish Hackday!
Posted on April 6, 2011
| n8fr8
We had a great group of people show up at our April 1st “Don’t Be Fooled” Hackday here at the OpenMobileLab in New York. There were users, there were devs, and all sorts of other people in between. We tracked some of the brainstormed ideas on an open etherpad at: http://piratepad.net/bQPFn6FOhN (text of this pasted in below).
The main outputs of the hacking were LilDebi, an updated Debian installer for Android, the beginnings of a Bitcoin digital currency client, and another called UpOn App, which uses the accelerometer and white noise generators in the device to stop your cellphone from spying on you.
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Growing Mobile Test Lab and Library
Posted on April 1, 2011
| n8fr8
At our new meatspace location in New York City, we are building up a library of mobile devices from around the world for open-source developers to use for testing, and specifically to help verify the security of apps running on different carrier configurations and hardware variables.
Mostly our collection has come from picking up what we can, when we can, always with an eye towards anything a few generations back from the state of the art.
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April 26: “Advancing the New Machine” at UC Berkeley
Posted on March 22, 2011
| n8fr8
I, along with a number of others from the Guardian Project core dev team, will be at the UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center “Advancing the New Machine” conference at the end of April. I am on a panel regarding security in the context of human rights. We will also be presenting the Secure Smart Cam project with our partners at Witness. (https://guardianproject.info/apps/securecam/).
You can learn more about the event here:
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Guardian Project: General Update March 2011
Posted on March 21, 2011
| n8fr8
We have recently updated our general presentation on the project, and thought we would share it with you here. Please post any comments, questions or feedback right here, and we will get back to you shortly.
You can find this presentation on Google Docs, where you can also find it in downloadable, offline formats.
Photos from our January Hackday
Posted on March 10, 2011
| n8fr8
Back in January, we held a very excellent hackday at Eyebeam in New York. We rooted a NookColor, made encrypted calls over SIP, and generally had a full day of talking about the state of mobile security and privacy. Thanks to everyone who attended, and many thanks to _hc and Eyebeam for hosting!
View the full Flickr photo set.
