Even encrypted connections provide metadata about an individual’s activities, as do patterns in an individual’s Internet traffic—which Ars found when we monitored the Internet traffic of NPR’s Steve Henn. But there’s a great deal of traffic that remains unencrypted, as Rogers noted during the presentation.
“Before the Snowden leaks, about one percent of Internet traffic was SSL protected,” he said. “Now it’s about three percent.”
The tools in PORTAL aren’t rocket science, Rogers told the Def Con audience. “The difference is that we’re packaging [tools] together and showing you how you can use these tools so you don’t have to think about it, and you can avoid the problems caused by human error.”
Virtual private networks provide some privacy, Lackey and Rogers said, but they don’t provide real anonymity—some VPN providers (particularly those in the US) keep logs of traffic, and they don’t provide end-to-end protection. Tor protects traffic for much of the trip—at least until they reach the exit node used to access the website or Internet service being requested. But Tor has hazards as well—in its basic form, it alerts those doing the monitoring that Tor is being used and can result in the user being targeted or blocked.
While there are other Tor-based tools to help protect anonymity, such as the Tor Browser bundle and the TAILS “live” CD and USB-bootable operating system, these are prone to accidental errors—like not waiting for Tor to be ready for traffic or simple misconfiguration. TAILS is restrictive, because it isolates the user within a Linux environment without access to local storage—not a great option for people who want to work with the operating system and software they use for their work.
“TAILS is a great project and piece of software, but it makes security assumptions about hardware which are probably not true today,” Lackey told Ars in an email interview after Def Con.
That’s where the “travel router” comes in. Lackey said that a customized, secure router that allows people to just connect with their existing device over Ethernet or Wi-Fi is the “sweet spot” for maintaining anonymity. It isolates encryption and obfuscation from the user’s computer and eliminates the risk of the user forgetting to turn protection on. “The big advantage of something like PORTAL is being able to isolate failures to a dedicated outboard device and with a conceptually simple UI/UX,” Lackey told Ars. “It’s a physical device, and when it’s present and connected in line, traffic must pass through it. It never has your sensitive information on it.”