Privacy Architecture Summary

Summary of privacy architecture information, personal data threats, limitations to online privacy.

A cautionary note: Even when running open source applications at the upper layers (software), the underlying technology (hardware) may have various vulnerable elements.

An example of this is if you are running all open-source software and an open-source operating system on a machine built on top of an Intel processor, a a hacker or government agency could exploit a vulnerability at the Underlying Technology Layer to take control of or monitor all of your activities at the Application Layer through what is known as a zero day exploit.

A “zero day” vulnerability is a security flaw or back door to a piece of software or hardware that may be exploited by a bad actor. The name points to urgency: developers have “zero days” to fix the problem once it is discovered. An example of two such vulnerabilities, the Meltdown and Spectre exploits that affected all Intel and AMD microprocessor chipsets, was announced publicly in January 2018. “Project Zero”, a team of security analysts employed by Google to find zero-day vulnerabilities, published a blog post on these exploits which you can read in the links below.

In 2017, Wikileaks was responsible for releasing a huge vault of information on the capabilities of the US government to exploit vulnerabilities within virtually every software application and smart device on the planet.

See also Reading Privileged Memory with a Side Channel.