👋 right on! I actually also have used containers as a key to my security layout before, but yeah you miss out on all the benefits of portage.

I was doing something crazy and actually running Gentoo inside each one! It was very difficult to stay up-to-date. But I basically had my host as barebones as possible and used LibVirt containers for everything, attempting to make a few templates that I could keep updated and base other VMs on. I was able to keep this up for about two years then I had to relax (was my main PC). But it was really secure, and it does work.

The benefit of encapsulation is that you have a lot of freedom inside each container, like install a different distro if you need to. Also as long as they are isolated you don’t need to worry as much about their individual security. But it’s still good to. I ran SELinux on the host and non-SELinux (but hardened) in the guests.

SELinux has a lot of advantages over users/groups, but I think the latter can be just as secure if you know what you’re doing. For example with SELinux you can prevent certain applications from accessing the network, or restrict access to certain ports, etc. It’s also useful for desktop environments where a lot of GUI apps run under one user- e.g. neither my main user nor any other program can access my keepassxc directory, only the keepassxc process (and root) can (even though the application is running under my main user). You can also restrict root quite a bit, especially if you compile in the option to prevent disabling SELinux at boot (I need to recompile my kernel to disable it).

But again while it is fun to learn, it is quite a pain and I’ve relaxed the setup on my new computer to use a different user for everything (including gui apps), which I think is secure enough for me. But this style relies on my ability to adhere to it, whereas with SELinux you can set it up to where you’re forced to

Like others have mentioned, SELinux could be a great addition. It can be a massive pain, but it’s really effective at locking things down (if configured properly).

However, the difficulty will depend on the distro. I use it with Gentoo, which has plenty of support/docs for it and provides policies for many packages. Although (when running strict policy types) I usually end up needing to adjust them or write my own.

Obviously Red Hat would be another good choice, but I haven’t tried it. Fedora also has good support, but I’ve only ever used the OOTB targeted policies.

That said, I’ve started relying on users/groups more often lately, since it really gets in the way of everything.

I have this device and use it to store my keepassxc and onlykey backups, and it’s useful to me because I’ve stopped using passwords (I only need to remember the pins for these devices which can unlock my keepass dbs that have everything else).

It seems secure enough for my use case, especially since the files I store in it are themselves encrypted (the onlykey backup still requires a pin), but I still want them to be difficult to access.

I’ve had to rely on it before but only because I didn’t prepare a backup onlykey ahead of time- ideally it should be one of many recovery methods. But so far it’s worked great for me.

I use LUKS-encrypted LVM volumes to store everything (and transfer via SSH or HTTPS), but would use GPG if I needed to encrypt individual files.

Ah good to know! Will try that if I ever run into issues, thanks

I’ve been using it for years and I think it’s great. Currently on a 6 Pro. It’s true that some apps don’t work without Google Play services, but GrapheneOS has the option to install the google stuff in a sandbox, so you shouldn’t run into any issues if you do that. Personally, I don’t use Play services unless I need to, and use Aurora store for any apps that aren’t on F-Droid.

In any case, you can always revert to stock or try another OS

Edit: as faede has pointed out, it appears that Google Wallet has issues. Also, the usage docs mention issues with banking apps in general, so that’s something to consider

I’m happy with it so far! No swipe typing, and it’s pretty difficult to land on the right key, but I’ve found that I’m getting better at using it with time, especially after customizing it to my liking

Nice :). It’s pretty basic but has just enough configuration options for what I need. It’s basically just an app drawer and favorites drawer, but you can set the favorites drawer to never close and the app drawer to never open.

The UI tools are pretty limited and I had to play around with a screenshot in GIMP and re-arrange the exported settings file in order to get my favorites ordered as desired (possible without doing that, but slow). But since setting it up everything has been pretty smooth

Kvaesitso is pretty slick! I just tried it for a bit, and it looks well-written. I like having all my icons shrunk down and compressed on my desktop, so it’s not quite what I’m looking for, but I tried Discreet Launcher after your comment and was able to configure it pretty well to my liking. Still missing some features that I like from OpenLauncher but it has what I need

Oh good point, thanks for the heads up. I see that the last release was a few years ago and there are a lot of open issues. I haven’t had too many problems with it, but a launcher is something you don’t want to have security vulnerabilities for. Will look around for an alternative

Congrats! It’s great software. OsmAnd~, Unexpected Keyboard, OpenLauncher, Arcticons Dark, UntrackMe, and Mull are a few of my favorites. Aurora Store also, but I try not to use it unless I absoutely need to (I don’t have sandboxed Google services/Play installed)

Edit: OpenLauncher might be a bit out of date. Will switch to Discreet Launcher for now, but the dev has stopped adding features and will only release bugfixes and Android compatibility updates moving forward

Try going down the page and looking for the categories with more than a few bits of identifying information. I’m running LibreWolf with just uBlock Origin and Dark Reader (which I don’t think influences results) and I’m able to get nearly-unique, instead of unique (but I do get unique on default settings). TBB gets non-unique, which is a good set of results to compare to.

In my case I noticed that my fonts were really unique so I set browser.display.use_document_fonts = 0. Also I use my WM to set my page resolution to 1920x1080, which seems to have a better fingerprint than the default LibreWolf floating resolution of 1600x900 (and even the letterboxing resolutions, from what I can tell).

I just spent some time testing again and checking for anything else. RFP does force a generic user agent, but unfortunately it keeps the version information and I can’t figure out how to change it with RFP on. Would be nice to set it to the ESR version used by TBB (which has lower bits), but I’m not sure if that would lead to a more unique fingerprint (if, say, a feature was detected that is available in later versions but not ESR).

Edit: just tried Mullvad browser, and it’s non-unique! Might be the best option.

Was getting 71% on Librewolf with only uBlock Origin. Enabled every blocklist in the extension and am now getting 100%. Thanks for sharing!

No problem! And yeah, it’s good to see people talking about it over here. I think it’s the best tool for online privacy OOTB (depending on your threat model), and it gets better the more people use it.

The difference is that your ISP doesn’t know where your packets are headed, and the destination doesn’t know where your packets came from. The ISP sees you connect to the entrance node and the destination sees you connect from the exit node, and it’s very difficult for anyone to trace the connection back to you (unless they own both the entrance and exit and use traffic coorelation or some other exploit/fingerprint). Regardless, both parties are generally able to tell that you are using TOR if they reference lists of known entrance/exit nodes. Also the anti-fingerprinting measures taken by TB are a bit more strict than other privacy-focused browsers

It’s great for anything low bandwidth that isn’t tied to your identity, and helps for peace of mind, despite its issues. You do run into captcha or DDOS protection issues occasionally, but the new tor circuit for this site button sometimes works. Also it uses letterboxing to prevent resolution-based fingerprinting, which isn’t very pretty, but leaving it at its default size (or locking the size using the WM) works well and is good for privacy.

fl0w.cc- single user; the domain is meant to be part of my username :)