Author: project Date: To: tails-dev@boum.org Subject: [Tails-dev] Question about remote VMs
Hi,
After a major roadblock, I am repurposing a project that I was building and since Tails will be a key part of the new implementation I would like to have your feedback.
It would be a tarball or something like that with Tails, GNOME Box, etc., all necessary to expose a localhost server to the internet with its own free .onion URL. The point is that anybody can connect through Tor and have these remote machines run by volunteers do whatever they please, not just computationally, but accessing clearnet if they use Unsafe Browser with normal TLS handshakes and traffic appearing to originate at the remote VM (normal websites that block Tor can still be accessible by using Tor only to get to the VM).
This, in and of itself is not difficult and I +/- know how to do it, but I do not want the host to see in plaintext whatever the guest does. I mean, it could be but is less fun this way and does not give plausible deniability to the volunteers. I am discarding confidential computing as this depends on certain Intel/ARM hardware that might be common on server computers but not on PCs and my solution needs to be mostly software-based with its limitations...
Being the ultimate Tails experts and having seen the vulnerabilities associated to running it on a VM, do you have any advice on how I could help myself here? With future technology like fully homomorphic encryption maybe an entire VM can be encripted but today this is not just computationally taxing, it does not appear to be feasible for all the nuances of what an operating system does. There is a repo called oblivm that based on the name suggests something like Oblivious RAM/ORAM + VM, but not sure, it is in Java and I intend to do whatever I do in C preferably.