Intended for qemu-discuss
/cc/ libvir-list, whonix-devel, tor-dev
***
Hello. I work on WhonixOS an anonymity distro based on
Tor. This feature request is related to the topics of privacy
and anonymity. Its a complex topic and probably not in your area
of focus but I think it has important implications because
security and privacy are very much related in today's hostile
computing environment.
Virtualization is useful in presenting an identical
environment and set of "hardware" for each user which goes a
long way in creating an anonymity set of systems. That way a
system attacker, advertisers and online trackers would not be
able to fingerprint a user or their hardware.
The problem: Tracking techniques have become more
sophisticated with time. They advanced from simple cookies to
browser/device fingerprinting (which Tor Browser focuses on
defeating) to user behavior fingerprinting. The latter is about
profiling how a user types on a keyboard or uses a mouse [2].
Keystroke dynamics is a super creepy way to track users
based on how long they press keys (dwell time) and the time
between key presses (gap time). This is extremely accurate at
identifying individuals because of how unique these measurements
are. Advertising networks (Google, Facebook...) that
fingeprprint users on both the clearnet and Tor can deanonymize
users. This technique is already actively used in the wild
[6][7].
Potential Solutions:
Since input devices are all emulated its a great
opportunity to stop this profiling technique.
* A security researcher designed a proof of concept
plugin for Chrome browser that mitigates this. Implementing
something like the PoC addon in [1] known as KeyBoardPrivacy.
Some random delay in milliseconds in a 50 millisecond range for
dwell and gap times for the emulated keyboards is enough to skew
the values to render this attack useless while not affecting
performance.
* The changes made to Tor Borwser to make JS timers more
coarse grained but constant (250ms for keyboard events) were not
enough to stop keystroke dynamics fingerprinting because a
malicious script can evict the cache and allow extrapolation of
true timing events within 1-5ms accuracy .[3][5] Their goal is
to instead add jitter to the timers [4]. A similar solution
proposed in [4] can be implemented in all QEMU-KVM timers to
mitigate both attacks.
[1]
https://paul.reviews/behavioral-profiling-the-password-you-cant-change/
[2]
http://jcarlosnorte.com/security/2016/03/06/advanced-tor-browser-fingerprinting.html
[3]
https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2015/07/30/double-bill-password-hashing-competition-keyboardprivacy/#comment-1288166
[4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16110
[5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/1517
[6] http://scraping.pro/no-captcha-recaptcha-challenge/
[7]
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/11/01/facebook-to-silent-track-users-cursor-movements-to-see-which-ads-we-like-best/
Another option, when operating at a low enough level (OS,
qemu or anywhere else outside the browser sandbox) is to
rearrange keystroke events as follows:
Regular keys (letters, digits, characters, F-keys etc.)
are presented as if they are released right after each
keypress (0 or 1ms delay) regardless of actual dwell
time.
The 4 lock keys (caps, num, scroll and unshifted insert)
are similarly filtered as instantaneous presses.
Arrow keys etc. are filtered so short presses are reduced
to a single (0 or 1ms) short press while long
(autorepeating) presses are not (because good browsers
adjust the scroll rate to use the actual scroll speed
rather than the autorepeat time of the keyboard).
Shift keys (shift, ctrl, alt, some uses of the logo keys)
are filtered to appear as if pressed 1ms before the
affected key and released 1ms after. Shift key+mouse
button
combinations also need to be handled.
All key times are rounded to multiples of some fixed
granularity clock (e.g. multiples of 50ms), except for the
simulated 1ms and 0ms delays above (which would then be
relative to the rounded times).
Additional considerations are needed for east Asian
keyboard
layouts (China/Japan/Korea) due to their complex extra shift keys.
Some non-spying applications (browser and otherwise) may
need to be exempted because their user-oriented purpose is
to do unusual keyboard interpretations. I happen to make
one such application. Qemu itself is another. Games
that
use letters as navigation keys (WASD etc.) or require precise
timing of key presses is a third group.
Enjoy
Jakob
--
Jakob Bohm, CIO, Partner, WiseMo A/S. https://www.wisemo.com
Transformervej 29, 2860 Søborg, Denmark. Direct +45 31 13 16 10
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