Re: Freenet in Whonix

On 2016-12-17 12:59, Florent Daigniere wrote:
> On Fri, 2016-12-16 at 19:13 +0100, [email protected] wrote:
>> Hi. Whonix [0] dev here.
>> 
>> We are looking for a censorship-resistant and decentralized way to 
>> communicate notifications about critical situations [1] to our users
>> and 
>> host the project metadata and files themselves to resist a Permanent 
>> Takedown Attack threat.[2] Freenet meets our needs perfectly but 
>> unfortunately as documented it cannot work over Tor.
> 
> I don't see how any Tor-based control could help against such a
> threat...
> 
> Tor relies on a distributed concensus to be reached/published/available
> to work; If you prevent such concensus from being reached/published
> (DDoSing the directory authorities being the obvious route) for long
> enough, no one will be able to use the network anymore (the concensus
> expires to protect against what you call "Indefinite freeze attacks").
> 
> Florent

That's an excellent point and its something the Tor devs are looking at:

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-October/009821.html

***

Emergency Notifcation system aside there is nothing Tor-centric about 
Whonix's design and we can apply the same concept to Freenet - something 
we can discuss separately. We have plans for an I2P Gateway (I2PBox) in 
very early stages.

in a nutshell:

* Whonix Gateway is a separate VM that forces all traffic thru any 
anonymous network of choice
* Whonix Workstation - The untrusted VM where users run applications 
configured with safe defaults that can only access the network via a 
virtual isolated NIC connected only to Whonix Gateway.


For this to work with Freenet we need to make sure that:

* Freenet on the the Gateway can be locked down preventing malicious 
commands from affecting its configuration.

* A second Freenet instance in the Workstation is running in a dummy 
mode thats used to run Freenet plugins/applications and connects via the 
Gateway Freenet to make network requests while any data is cached only 
on the workstation.


This all depends on Freenet's architecture and whether it can run in 
such a way to accomodate the split design of Whonix.

Thoughts?
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