Is Flawless Anonymity Possible?
Anonymity is always a debatable subject. Let’s suppose you want to post an anonymous comment on a social network. You want it to be completely anonymous. How to do that? With Tor? VPN? SSH tunnel?
Well, to do so, you don’t need any of these things. It would be enough to buy a burner SIM card and a used smartphone on a flea market. Then simply drive far away from the place of your residence, put the card in the phone, leave a comment and throw the phone into the river.
But what if you need more privacy than merely leaving one anonymous comment? Imagine you want to be able to perform your daily activities with the degree of anonymity that’s extremely hard or even impossible to compromise. Well, in this article we will see if we can find the solution.
Flawless anonymity already became a theoretic concept, but it is possible to stay anonymous by combining multiple layers of protection. A person cannot be uniquely identified if it uses a combo of different complementary tools.
Entry-level security
The first degree of security and anonymity can be roughly achieved by using the following scheme:
Client -> VPN/Tor/SSH tunnel -> Target
This is only allowing you to hide your IP address. It does not provide genuine anonymity you could rely on. VPNs are also not that secure, as in case both public and private someone already knows your real address and your external address, leaving a lot of room for detection.
Tor use is already seen as something suspicious in itself. Furthermore, all exit nodes are known, making it a red flag for the majority of websites.
In summary, if you need to keep your most important personal data private from the rest of the world and use the internet while keeping your connection speed high enough then you should use a VPN.
High level of security
Here’s what the high-level security scheme looks like:
Client -> VPN -> Remote workspace (over RDP or VNC) -> VPN -> Target
The computer you use to connect to the internet should be ideally a Windows 10 machine with Firefox, and a few plugins such as ad-block installed. It should look like the millions of other computers out there. And in case of the data leak, you will remain protected behind the second VPN.
Flawless security
The closest we can get to the flawless anonymity is the following scheme:
Client -> Double VPN (hosted in different data centers that are close to one another) -> Remote workspace with a virtual machine -> VPN -> Target
This scheme involves a primary and secondary VPN connection, having you protected in case of any data breach. Your traffic will be concealed, keeping your IP address private.
As you can see, it’s not that easy to stay anonymous. Too many things are being tracked at any time, and personal data together with sensitive information need to be handled very carefully in order to keep them safe. All of these security methods become useless when you sign into one of the accounts you have on mainstream mail or social media providers.
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