Today I wanted to speak about a particular product that has caught my interest. Being in the world of cybersecurity, I come across several different projects that seem to have one common goal: consumer privacy. They all claim to protect you from malware, hackers, and prying eyes. The most popular of products geared toward this need are VPNs. They seem to have instilled a new standard on how you should browse sensitive or even explicit information on the web. Creating this argument that they are accident proof and without flaws. However, this is far from the truth. VPN's are quite actually the most ironic form of privacy. Being closed source and in control of all their datacenters, makes them vulnerable to the jurisdictions in the country they are located. Take a look at the several different VPN companies that simply hand over their customer's activity to any low level agency. This creates a different conversation. What are VPN's really protecting us from? Can we utilize VPN's for highly sensitive information? The answer is no.
Some of you may already know this, and have moved on to decentralized privacy solutions. Ones like the likes of the Tor network. Even though the Tor network is very reliable and if used correctly can be configured to provide extreme levels of privacy, the average individual fails to set it up properly. They usually set it up in a closed source environment such as a Windows or macOS install. This itself already puts your anonymity at a disadvantage, as you are never quite sure about the information being sent back to the respective companies about your activity within these operating systems. Not only are you at the mercy of these huge corporations, your internet activity in itself is limited to just a browser. Anything you do outside of this browser can and will be able to expose your identity. For example, if you download a file that opens an application outside of the Tor browser - you have already gave away your IP through the internet connections operating outside of this browser's instance.
Now for a high profile individual this would be unacceptable. Becoming a person of interest just by pressing the wrong button, is a risk he/she cannot afford. Let alone all the forensic information left on the computer's hard drive, this is a whole other story. Having to purchase and run CCleaner, TMAC, slow VMWare, or sketchy RDPs are just more opportunities to mess up due to human error. We are not robots and we cannot simply make sure everything is in line at all times, especially under pressure. However, there is a solution.
One solution that has got my attention is the Zero Trace Pen. This device encrypts all your network activity by default using the Tor network. This includes applications outside of the browser's instance. Not only does it create this accident proof environment but it comes pre loaded with 40+ privacy applications, that upon further research are quite necessary to operate in today's climate.
I read a few reviews about the pen, some good and some bad - but I decided to see for myself. I understand that in this class of products there will be a lot of secrecy as well as mixed opinions regarding the integrity of the device. The only way to truly see is to try for oneself. The Zero Trace Pen seems to fall within this class and upon further research I realized that this product has been around since 2011 (Silk Road era) under a different name. A highly respected individual by name of "HugBunter" was advocating for it's implementation several years ago on the respective forums.
That immediately gave me more confidence in the product as it has been in circulation for quite some time. Once I received the Zero Trace Pen I got to work. I started running tests from network connectivity and hardware identity, carefully vetting the code for any sort of malware or hidden pingbacks to a server. I found nothing of the sort. I was actually quite relived to see that I had root access to the device and could check every single aspect of it's integrity without running into any "closed source wall."
Now I have installed loads of Linux distributions in my past, but I have never seen anything quite like this one. To the regular eye, this might seem just like your everyday Debian privacy focused fork, but it actually is quite more than that. To begin with, I realized that the Tor encryption actually changes relays every 15 minutes. This means every hour your IP is changed 4 times without you having to lift a finger. While other custom set ups claim to keep you encrypted, you have to manually change this yourself. The Zero Trace Pen actually does this for you. Another thing I realized was that the mac address reset every time I turned it on. When I pinged the hardware properties from different apps, I realized that the network card kept spoofing itself as different devices depending on which app I used to callback the hardware ID. This is quite unusual and adds such a high level of anonymity that even the operating system Edward Snowden brags about cannot compete.
Additionally, there seems to be a hardware component within the Zero Trace Pen, that is responsible for all these features. Sort of like a data blocker that prevents any data to be recoverable from the flash drive after usage. Normally, a regular live USB would leave traces of it's activities until it overwrites itself upon the next boot up, but the Zero Trace Pen actually has a battery component that simulates a "boot up" resetting and rotating it's identity multiple times after unplugging it from your PC.
I plan on later opening the pen up and seeing the actual hardware components that could be causing this protocol to take place. More on that later.
