Steve "Arrakis" Topletz: Portable Privacy

Published: Jan. 9, 2006, 11:10 p.m.

Privacy is an increasingly scarce commodity. It is a state that must be preserved, and in many cases, enforced. In prior history, you could expect your person and affects to be relatively private, however with so much data available for mining, and so many practices eroding ones privacy, one can have little to no expectation of privacy, unless you provide it to yourself. The problem in the past has been that encryption, networking, and anonymity were difficult beasts to grasp, much less to use. With the rise of OpenSSL and subsequent projects like Onion Routing, the new playing field isn't simply to prove anonymity is possible in an academic sense, but to make it practical in every day usage. We see no reason why privacy and security should be difficult, or require a compromise of one over the other. We humbly discuss the use of tools that rely on such anonymous and secure communications protocols, and introduce a few new ones that are superior to previous generations. Prior they have been limited in scope and practicality to systems administrators and those very intimate with crypto, infosec, and networking. With the advent of practicality and the increasing maturity of such networks, new tools and applications have been developed.

We introduce the XeroBank Machine, the first bootable, leak-proofed, encrypted, hardened, dual virtualized operating system. XB Machine is unlike the predecessors before it. NOTE TO DEFCON STAFF: included is a a diagram to explain the design of xB Machine. This a true james bond style tool that we are releasing for free. All the hard work and hundreds of programming hours have been put into it to provide a secure portable operating system you can both boot, or instantiate from an existing boot state on virtually all virtual machine emulators such as VMWare and QEMU. The program is fully open source." Steve Topletz is a member of Hacktivismo, an international group of hackers, human rights workers, lawyers and artists that evolved out of THE CULT OF THE DEAD COW. Mr. Topletz is the developer of Torpark, the most popular free anonymous web browser, with over 3 million international users, and he is also the administrator of XeroBank, a commercial anonymity network.