[Tails-dev] uVirtus design

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Author: intrigeri
Date:  
To: dlshad
CC: tails-dev
Subject: [Tails-dev] uVirtus design
Hi Dlshad,

(Please keep the public tails-dev mailing-list in the Cc
list, thanks!)

I'm one of the Tails [1] developers, and someone pointed me at uVirtus
so I got curious and I had a look to see what we could learn from your
project. I have some questions for the uVirtus team, but I was not
able to find any way to reach you all, so I'm writing to you directly.
Please point me to the relevant contact information, and feel free to
add the other team members to the loop.

First, I'm glad more and more people are working in this space,
and different solutions being experimented with!

I don't get why uVirtus is using OpenVPN in addition to Tor (via the
obfsproxy pluggable transport). I did not find the answer on the
uVirtus website, and a blog post of yours [4] did not help much.
Could you please clarify? I've been confused about the claim that
"uVirtus is providing the anonymity to its users through VPN
connections to uVirtus servers around the world" [3], which seems to
contradict the other documentation that talks of obfsproxy.
More generally, the threat model uVirtus is meant to address was not
obvious to me after reading the website. How is it different from the
one we described in the Tails specification [5]? E.g., is uVirtus
trying to address the "computer equipment that has been used is seized
and examined by adversaries" threat? What kind of adversary is the
anonymity meant to be strong against?

uVirtus is released under the GPL (great!), but I was not able to find
the source code anywhere. Where can I download it to have a look
behind the curtain?

It seems to me that some Tails documentation was copy'n'pasted, and
re-published [2] on the uVirtus website under a different license.
No big harm done, really, but I suspect the uVirtus project will get
more respect and better cooperation in the free software community if
you deal more seriously with such copyright and licensing matters.
Funnily enough, this work is re-published under a license that
requires attribution to its authors :)

The link to the source code at the end of
https://uvirtus.org/wiki/index.php/Under_Ground_VPN is broken.
Is https://github.com/VirtusNow/Updates the right one?

Now going to actually boot uVirtus :)

[1] https://tails.boum.org/
[2] https://uvirtus.org/wiki/index.php/Burn_to_DVD_or_install_on_USB_stick
[3] https://uvirtus.org/wiki/index.php/Before_using_uVirtus_you_should_know
[4] http://www.dlshad.net/?p=135
[5] https://tails.boum.org/contribute/design/

Cheers,
--
intrigeri
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