Monthly report n⁰19 - 2023-08

Context of the project

PiRogue Tool Suite is a reboot of PiRanhaLysis project. Today, PiRanhaLysis is used by a variety of users ranging from universities (e.g. the University of Yale), activists and NGOs, and received lot of interest. Too much traction in fact to be maintained in our spare time, as we have done until now. Currently, the project is at the proof-of-concept stage. To get to a wider adoption by the general public, we need to streamline the build process and smooth the interface. Our goal is to make the project as accessible as possible.

The project

The problem: the lack of open-source means (hardware + software) to assess both privacy and security of mobile devices. Depending on HRD goals, they should want to educate, conduct emergency assessment or off-the-field investigations.

The plan: As with all the other projects we do, we are the first users of the technologies we develop and we aim to provide open-source, low-cost, well maintained, easy to use and easy to build hardware and software.

We have the following functioning modes for PTS:

• an on-the-field mode

  • for emergency response (active spying, device tampering, …) useful for responders in repressive environment
  • conduct forensics analysis and network detection using a pre-installed set of tools

• an expert mode for technical people to:

  • determine the list of collected data
  • assess regulatory compliance
  • conduct penetration testing
  • analyze malware’s behavior
  • ensure reproducible analysis
  • generate comprehensive reports

The PiRogue is an open hardware device based on a Raspberry Pi operating as a network router (like any ISP router) analyzing network traffic in real time.

What we have done so far

You can check out our work on GitHub at https://github.com/PiRogueToolSuite/ or on our website at https://pts-project.org/.

PiRogue

We are now testing Debian 12 PiRogue packages on both Raspberry Pi 3B and Raspberry Pi 4. Those packages will be released and published at https://pts-project.org/debian-12/ along with the corresponding OS image.

Community and outreach

We continue working on the learning materials. The list is available at https://pts-project.org/guides/.

After discussing and working for a few months with NOYB, they will be filing a first batch of legal complaints in France against a few very well known Android mobile apps. The complaints are mainly based on PiRogue analysis. The analysis methodology will later be published on our website.

We are hosting a beta version of Colander which is open to community members. Feel free to ask for an account.

What we plan to do next month

• continue working on the knowledge graph editor
• continue working on the learning materials
• continue doing demo sessions of Colander for community partners
• continue testing PiRogueOS 12

Challenges

We are facing a technical issue related to the OS upgrade. More precisely, PiRogue specific udev rules are not correctly deployed after Linux kernel updates.