psych0tik releases GoogleSharing proxy

A few weeks ago we released a post on staying anonymous online through the use of various configuration changes and Firefox add-ons. One of the Firefox add-ons mentioned was the GoogleSharing proxy add-on. This allows Firefox to reroute unauthenticated requests to Google services through a community proxy that hides your identity while you browse the internet. This add-on is still in beta, so we browsed the source and did a few tests with tcpdump to ensure that it was infact doing what it claimed to be.

GoogleSharing will reroute the following Google services (however, it can be configured not to reroute requests to specific services):

• Maps
• Groups
• News
• Video
• Products
• Images
• Finance

This is a really neat concept for staying anonymous from Google. The proxy itself masks your IP address, cookies and other headers so that even while logged into other Google services, such as Gmail, searches are not linked to you. We validated this through the use of tcpdump [see figure 1 and 2(generated by Wireshark)] and you can also validate it based on the different appearance of Google web pages, including the link for “Sign Out” which reads “Sign In” with GoogleSharing enabled.

Figure 1 – GoogleSharing is disabled. We can see the lookup of google.com via DNS and then the request (with the search string) being sent to an IP address returned from the DNS request

Figure 2 – GoogleSharing is enabled (however, not using SSL.) We can see the lookup of the psych0tik development proxy, storm, and the following request to storm’s IP address with the Google search.

You can access the psych0tik GoogleSharing proxy by adding it to your proxy list.

Proxy Server: storm.psych0tik.net

Non-SSL Port: 8080

SSL Port: 8443

If you choose to use the proxy in SSL mode (highly recommended), you will need to do the following:

1. Browse to https://storm.psych0tik.net:8443
2. When prompted, add an exception for the SSL certificate
3. Verify under GoogleSharing’s options for the psych0tik server that “use SSL” is enabled
4. Enjoy!

If you have any questions or issues please contact a psych0tik staff member via our psych0tik IRC. We’ve established #googleshareproxy to provide general chat with regards to this service.

-psych0tik Staff