antiTree | posts and projects
posted on Mar 25, 2014

Rochester’s version of a Security B-Sides is coming up next week. There’s a rush to finalize everything and there might be a question about this new event I’ve referenced as “Privacy Workshop”, “OPSEC Training”, or just AntiTree talks for 3 hours. The Privacy Workshop Track is something that came out of an ad-hoc event that @CJP has been doing for the last couple of BSidesROC’s. He would walk in and say “I want to do a key signing party” and we’d go “Awesome!” and set him up with a table. This workshop/lecture series is an expansion on this idea where we said we’d like to do more than just key signing, we wanted to teach you what you’re doing get you started. As GPG is a pretty good answer to some of the surveillance out there, I thought I would expand it into a series of presentations focusing on other tools with a similar goal. I’ve broken it down into three parts; Connectivity, Communication, and Operations. The tools I’ll be focusing on will be Tor, TAILS, and GPG. Operational security with TAILS, anonymous connectivity with Tor, and secure communications with GPG.

With Tor, my main goal is to address the most common questions like “But I bet the NSA has a backdoor in Tor, right?” So I’ve turned it into a discussion about how Tor works, and ways it can be broken. I’d be happy to discuss real threats to Tor, but I’m pretty bored with the “Tor is funded by the government” tin-hat talk. I find it actually really interesting the challenges that Tor has so in other words, I’m just looking for people to have conversations with. 🙂

GPG and TAILS are both hands on workshops aimed at getting your hands dirty with both of the tools. GPG is pretty straight forward for the most part and I’ll go into a few extra tips that I think are interesting and then to go through Keybase.io if there’s time.

With TAILS, I’ve even built some USB sticks with TAILS prebuilt on them. I thought it might be interesting for the workshop to provide a hands on experience as quickly as possible.

Of course all of this is still up in the air, so I reserve the right to change everything. 🙂 I’m just hoping that with all the time I’m putting into putting this together, there are people actually interested. 🙂