Wikispooks talk:Anonymous Submissions
Could you give us some assurance that the evil Flash form will never sneakily "phone home" to Adobe (as so many of their products have done in the past), thereby betraying the submitter's IP Address and web browser details etc. to various snoopers ?
Does it set a Flash Local Shared Object "super cookie" ?
You would be better off using a standard SSL encrypted web form, ideally with a proper Wikispooks.com Digital Certificate, or perhaps another one (e.g. as used by your web hosting provider), provided that you inform people beforehand which webserver the form is being run from.
You should also remind people that they can submit files which have been encrypted using your published PGP public encryption key when they are using this Anonymous Uploads form.
(signature added following Peter's feedback)
Tourist 09:03, 31 May 2010 (IST)
- Thanks for the feedback - useful stuff. This is the current situation:
- The Wikispooks site is run by people (mainly myself) who are not complete dummies on the finer points of security, but neither do we claim to be at the technical cutting edge. The anonymous upload form does NOT 'phone home' to Adobe - or anywhere else, but you only have my personal assurance on that. During the next month or so, the form will be changed and be resident on a subdomain of the main Wikispooks domain and server. It will employ SSL and be certified by a recognised authority. At present the form DOES report the originating IP address but, as with the Apache server logs, the reports are deleted regularly. - See Privacy Policy and its caution/disclaimer. Wikispooks is an unsupported low budget operation undertaken in good faith. It is not perfect but its purpose and ethos is exactly as explained in the Project documentation. All this is not to say that our esteemed SIS's are not perfectly capable of setting something very like this as a honeytrap, or monitoring/interfering in nefarious ways - they quite clearly are - but as JFK himself said:
I'm just doing what I've got to do the best I can."A man does what he must - in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures - and that is the basis of all human morality."
- PS - It would help if you added your sig to discussion contribs. It appears on the 'recent changes' page but having it in the discussion avoids confusion --Peter P 08:47, 31 May 2010 (IST)
Digital Certificate and PGP - better security than Wikileaks.org !
It is very welcome to see that https://Wikispooks.com have now installed a Digital Certificate to complement your published PGP public encryption / signing key.
As well as still being a proper wiki, which allows user Discussions and comments, you are now more "secure" for anonymous contributors and for registered Discussion pages commentators or analysts, than the heavily self-hyped and controversial http://WikiLeakS.org website, which has abandoned the use of both of these cheap technologies, for no good reason and whose allegedly secure submissions pages at https://secure.wikileaks.org are currently broken.
Of course encryption, per se, does not guarantee the anonymity of whistleblowers or other contributors, or of the people with specialised knowledge or experience who may comment on such revelations or articles, but it is a good start.
Tourist 23:20, 2 July 2010 (IST)
- Thanks for the comments. Still have a few issues but we're getting their. I'm not seeking to replicate WikiLeaks - More a wiki-type version of Cryptome really, but with a narrower focus. I'll just keep plugging away until I'm joined seriously by a few others, in which case I'll be happy to turn it into an NP Company limited by guarantee; or I get fed up with it; or I pop my cloggs :-)) --Peter P 07:40, 3 July 2010 (IST)
Truecrypt http://www.truecrypt.org/ which facilitates a "hidden encrypted volume" whose existence is plausibly deniable because it cannot be forensically proven to exist at all.
TrueCrypt is an admirable set of strong cryptographic programs.
However their "hidden volume feature" suffers from exactly the same (non-technical) problem that "rubber hose cryptography" (developed by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.org fame) i.e. you will never convince a secret police interrogator or torturer, that you have actually revealed all the pass words or all the pass phrases to all the "hidden volumes" on your system, so that they will stop beating you with a rubber hose or applying electric shocks etc.
Even if physical torture is not involved, the notorious United Kingdom Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 Part III Investigation of electronic data protected by encryption etc.
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/ukpga_20000023_en_8#pt3
gives "any Police Constable" the power to issue a Section 49 Notice, which demands either your secret cryptographic keys or the unencrypted plaintext data.
Non-compliance with such a Section 49 Notice risks up to 2 years in prison, or, if the magic words "national security investigation" are used (nobody can explain exactly what is or is is not meant by "national security") then the penalty goes up to 5 years in prison.
Tourist 23:50, 2 July 2010 (IST)
- Agreed on all counts. Fact remains it IS plausibly deniable - used in a strictly technical sense. So far as I am aware there is NO way to prove the hidden volume exists. --Peter P 07:42, 3 July 2010 (IST)
Are Zip file archives allowed via the Anonymous Uploads form ?
1) The Anonymous Uploads instructions page sensibly suggests:
"If you have more than one document file, bundle them into a single compressed Zip file . "
However, on the new Web Form, (.zip) file extensions do not seem to be allowed:
"Allowable file extensions are: doc, rtf, pdf, csv, txt, xls, jpg, png, odt, dip, tar"
Are (.zip) files actively blocked or is the file extension just not listed on the form ?
You might also wish to consider Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 users (i.e. what is installed on new computers these days) who will, by default create (.docx) Word files and (.xlsx) Excel files or (.pptx) Powerpoint files
(.rar) is also a popular compressed archive format, especially for files or archives which have been securely dropped onto , say, RapidShare etc.
(.bmp) graphics files might not be very compressed, but they are the default format for Windows Screen Captures / Print Screen, requiring no extra graphics manipulation software.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_screen
2) There is usually a web server configuration limit to the size of a single upload via a web form, so it is worth stating what it is e.g. 10 MegaBytes etc.
3) The front page of https://Wikispooks.com, presumably outside of the MediaWiki directory structure, misspells "anonymous" as "annonymous" a couple of times.
Tourist 20:28, 3 July 2010 (IST)
- Thanks for all that. All good points which I will attend to asap. Zip files ARE specifically allowed just omitted (by mistake) from the form list. I'll specifically include all those others when I get time. Presumably that test upload was from you. I listed It just to show it was working
- --Peter P 20:11, 4 July 2010 (IST)
