Personally i feel the laptop/coreboot/openbsd isn't entirely necessary as I'm not sure what it accomplishes
an alternative would be tails on a flash drive (memorize your login creds) and with your laptop remove the harddrive
and change your MAC address and hostname every time you connect to wifi
but all of that is worthless if your cell phone is still able to generate a signal, so maybe dont bring cell phone or put in faraday bag
also are you driving your car where your license plate, make/model will be on camera? you will also be on camera at some point as well
not sure what the VPS accomplishes, seems unnecessary with tor, id also be especially careful not to use any vpn service, vps/proxies from work or home
public wifi with tor seems fine, perhaps you need a vpn to route tor traffic through if it's blocked on the public wifi, but as you said buying it with xmr (lets assume you purchase that anonymously as well) and any email require for the vpn is onionmail or something that you never log into from home/work
>Personally i feel the laptop/coreboot/openbsd isn't entirely necessary as I'm not sure what it accomplishes
Coreboot is open-source BIOS. It can be used instead of proprietary firmware found in almost every laptop.
OpenBSD is smaller and more secure than GNU/Linux.
>not sure what the VPS accomplishes, seems unnecessary with tor
OP probably wants to use a remote VPS to attack targets. I'm only assuming this since OP pointed out they posted in /d/hacking.
>perhaps you need a vpn to route tor traffic through if it's blocked on the public wifi
Tor over VPN is a disasterclass on multiple levels.
I believe you've misunderstood me. OP mentioned a privacy screen saver, to me this implied OP would be in a public space ie library, fast food join, whatever. ah fuck it, i was talking about a long distance wifi antenna or a "Yagi" like he also mentioned.
I was trying to go for both. The privacy screen for when I was physically present at the spaces where public Wi-Fi is avaible and the Yagi for when I feel extra watched and need somewhere to retreat. A healthy medium.
ahh yes. I thought you meant that there was some sort of anonymous starlink device, which IMO would be cool, but i'm pretty sure they all get your geo location somehow...
what you meant to say then, i believe, is that you prefer a parabolic grid style?
I've tried both, but for getting access to a public wifi, the yagi will win. I'm not sure why but I do believe (although I haven't tried, but in theory) a parabolic grid antenna should win when you have two of them pointed at each other over much longer distances, indeed. but if the access point isn't broadcasting signal over a parabolic antenna, the yagi receiver will usually take the W on distance and reception signal strength.
I'm a bit confused. How do you plan on connecting to public Wi-Fi if you remove the Wi-Fi card? Do you want to connect your Yagi to a USB Wi-Fi card? If so, how is it safer than using the internal one?
I'd use a USB Wi-Fi adapter that specifically supports monitor mode. I feel like that's way better than an internal PCIe adapter anyway because I can disconnect the adapter when I don't need it, making my system a bit more secure.
I get that with your threat model, there is no such things as overkill. But I would still like to know how not having a Wi-Fi card when you don't need it is more secure if you still end up having one most of the time when using the computer.
Also, Coreboot only installs on specific laptop models, and whether you can neuter the ME depends on how old you want your machine to be. If you're cool with using super old tech, an X200 laptop would fit that spec, but you might have to flash with a hardware flasher. Also, where are you going to buy an X200 (or a flash programmer) in cash? They're easy to find on eBay, but I guess you could browse through an old warehouse of technology, and your plan might work...
Another thing worth noting is that the AMD PSP is less of a concern as the Intel ME, because the former is more passive than the latter, and while it has access to main memory, it (supposedly) can't talk to the network interface card directly. So if it were to use kernel network stack memory to send a packet to a remote server, its code may need to be updated every time that a new kernel is installed, which is less feasible.
Anyhow, I'm sure that someone on here will point out that there are other weaknesses that might be more important than ME (I could be wrong though). There is already technology to read the radio signal that is produced by a laptop monitor, so attackers can point an antenna at your computer, and get a rough black and white view of it. That is regardless of firmware openness. So a narrow focus on buying a laptop in cash, or perhaps neutering the ME, might not be as helpful as other measures you could take?
About the "reading your monitor over an antenna", doesn't DisplayPort fix this because its stream is encrypted? DP is superior to HDMI anyhow.
I know the ME bit is a tad much, but I just can't trust a fully functioning computer within my notebook that can read my memory whenever. PSP definitely seems like the lesser evil of the two, but I'd still be uncomfortable doing what I'd do on a system with that built in. There are some fairly recent notebooks that are supported by coreboot (see System76, NovaCustoms, ...), so I'm not really worried about it being too old and or slow. Finding one of these notebooks on the used market however, now that's the tough part.
I was intentionally being vague when writing this, so that if government agencies who decided to lurk on this website came around my post, wouldn't think too much about what I was tryna do. But given I've joined the /d/hacking subdread and asked a question there already, it isn't that hard to decipher what I'm trying to do. OpSec fail #1.
How about using Whoix on top of Kicksecure? That helps to ensure that application data in its own vm has no way to communicate, except via the other vm that forwards everything to Tor. Otherwise, you'd set up proxies, but might open a file or program that accesses the clear net directly. I guess that an outbound firewall would help if you don't use Whonix, but the list of valid entry nodes would be changing over time.
I've thought of that. But as you may tell from my previous post /post/3e617362105a3496a012, I'm kind of an OpenBSD evangelist. I've thought of just biting the bullet and going for Kicksecure, but I'm still very much undecided. If I was using Kicksecure, I'd definitely be doing what you said though.
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