November 23, 2015 at 10:45How to keep secret correspondence. Part 2
- Transfer
In our blog, we often talk about our own cases - we write about how the business works with IaaS. In addition, we turn to the Western experience in the relevant field.
For example, we told:
Today we will continue our acquaintance with the leadership of one of the authors of The Intercept, who gave a detailed analysis of how to conduct correspondence using encryption methods. / Photo by Wendelin Jacober CC If you would like to skip reading and get down to practical steps right away, you can use the appropriate section in Mick Lee’s manual:
To get started, you need to create an account in Jabber using the Tor browser. We talked about this a bit in the first part .
For work on Windows and Linux Pidgin is used . Setting up this software likewise requires the background work of the Tor browser. Every time you need to do something with your Jabber accounts, your Tor browser should be running in the background.
Linux will require the pidgin, pidgin-otr, and tor packages.
In Pidgin, in the “Buddy List” window, select “Manage Accounts” and “Add Account”.
Further:
If everything is done correctly, you should see the “List of Interlocutors” window with the status “Available”.
Create an encryption key (OTR):
After the start of the exchange of encrypted messages, you can see the fingerprint of the key of your interlocutor, and he can see yours. If the fingerprint that was sent to you matches the fingerprint that is displayed in Pidgin, then this contact can be marked as reliable. If the fingerprints of the key do not match, this means that you have been attacked by an intermediary . In this case, do not mark the contact as reliable, but try to repeat the procedure a little later.
The Q & A and Secret Word methods work well here. For simplicity, you can simply confirm the OTR fingerprint via an external channel (not in the current chat), compare fingerprint characters and mark the contact as reliable. When these conditions are met on both sides, the conversation status will change from “Unverified” to “Protected” (Private).
For more instructions on setting up anonymous messaging on other platforms, see Mick Lee’s general guide .
For example, we told:
- about how Spotify scales the Apache Storm ,
- considered hardware for deep learning ,
- talked about an example of optimizing bandwidth in Ethernet networks ,
- about how the Airbnb engineering team “broke” the main database
- and started talking about anonymous correspondence (part 1).
Today we will continue our acquaintance with the leadership of one of the authors of The Intercept, who gave a detailed analysis of how to conduct correspondence using encryption methods. / Photo by Wendelin Jacober CC If you would like to skip reading and get down to practical steps right away, you can use the appropriate section in Mick Lee’s manual:
- for Mac OS X ,
- for the Windows ,
- for linux
- and for Android .
For Windows and Linux
To get started, you need to create an account in Jabber using the Tor browser. We talked about this a bit in the first part .
For work on Windows and Linux Pidgin is used . Setting up this software likewise requires the background work of the Tor browser. Every time you need to do something with your Jabber accounts, your Tor browser should be running in the background.
Linux will require the pidgin, pidgin-otr, and tor packages.
In Pidgin, in the “Buddy List” window, select “Manage Accounts” and “Add Account”.
Further:
- Tab “Proxy Server” (Proxy) - “Tor / Privacy (SOCKS5)”
- “Host” is “127.0.0.1”, “Port” is “9150” (for Windows), and “9050” (for Linux)
- “Protocol” - “XMPP”
- “Domain” - the name of the Jabber server
- Resource - anonymous
- “Add” - to save the settings
If everything is done correctly, you should see the “List of Interlocutors” window with the status “Available”.
Create an encryption key (OTR):
- “Buddy List” - “Tools” - “Plugins” - “Off-the-Record Messaging” - check the box to the left of it.
- “Configure Plugin” - select an account - “Generate” - check the box “Require private messaging”
After the start of the exchange of encrypted messages, you can see the fingerprint of the key of your interlocutor, and he can see yours. If the fingerprint that was sent to you matches the fingerprint that is displayed in Pidgin, then this contact can be marked as reliable. If the fingerprints of the key do not match, this means that you have been attacked by an intermediary . In this case, do not mark the contact as reliable, but try to repeat the procedure a little later.
The Q & A and Secret Word methods work well here. For simplicity, you can simply confirm the OTR fingerprint via an external channel (not in the current chat), compare fingerprint characters and mark the contact as reliable. When these conditions are met on both sides, the conversation status will change from “Unverified” to “Protected” (Private).
For more instructions on setting up anonymous messaging on other platforms, see Mick Lee’s general guide .