2 Oct 2002 Artimage   » (Journeyer)

Java

It has been a few years since I played around with java so it is nice to be back. I am trying to write a plug-in for WebProxy that will automate cookie collection and analysis. During this I found a place where I wanted to copy an object, so being from a C++ school of thought, I figured a copy constructor. I did a google search and found an interesting article arguing that in Java instead of a copy constructor one should implement the cloneable interface. It turns out that is interface is supported by Object, so that all one has to do is make a public method that calls the super.clone(). Wham, you have a copy. Simple, elegant, and easy. Now if the the rest of the API was only clean.

The Bunker

So my friend Lock now has the server that we will ship off to The Bunker. It is a dual proc 1U with two SCSI 3 drives. I believe he set it up to be a ~76G RAID 0 array. As of today it has FreeBSD and all the packages we need, so hopefully we can ship it across the pond by the end of the week. :) Today will be spent locking it down so that when it finally gets net access we won't get hacked in the first 30 seconds. We need to install tripwire before we ship it too.. Can't forget that. I am quite excited to finally have a secure box in a secure location. As soon as its up, we can put a remailer on it. And maybe a Tarzan node if they release the source.

Tarzan

I read the Tarzan white paper over the past few days. Since Def Con I have been thinking about this stuff a lot. Roger Dingledine has made me really pessimistic about anonymity, of course he has chosen the toughest possible threat model. It seems to me that what Tarzan offers us is a leap ahead of everything else, but still won't satisfy Roger. The basic problem is that traffic analysis is still possible, and over time, it will work. Having said that, this system seems to do well against many forms of attacks. It assumes that every node has global knowledge of the node network, which allows them to do some interesting things. I still think that active attacks using DOS will be possible. But this system is a lot better than anything I can run at the moment. So that makes me happy. Still, it would be nice to get provable security. (Though that may be impossible.) Maybe using Palladium to ensure nodes can not be malicious will give us a boost. But even if you can guarantee that active attacks by nodes are impossible there is still traffic analysis. It seems to be that traffic analysis is like brute force, it always wins.

Danger

At lunch I am going to go down the street and see if the local T-Mobil store has the new Sidekick for sale. This is simply the Danger hip-top renamed. I like the fact that it has unlimited data sending, and since my company pays for my cell phone now, I figure I might as well try this thing out. So I am going to go and see if its really as cool as it looks, if it is, expect me to post a review.

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