Imperial College London Department of Computing SnowWall: A Visual Firewall for the Surveillance society Madalina-Ioana Sas
[email protected] June 2017 Supervised by Dr. William J. Knottenbelt Submitted in part fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Computing of Imperial College London. 2 Abstract In the past two decades we have seen a steady increase in the adoption of various technologies that fit into what can be described as a digital lifestyle. Sharing data, experiences and our most intimate thoughts has become second nature to most people connected to the Internet. And as market trends shift so did the approach that companies and governments have in regards to each individual's digital footprint. The uncharted wild west that used to be the internet of yesteryear has become a battleground where everyone is fighting over who knows the user better. Findings such as the Snowden and the Vault7 leaks have deeply shaken the status quo in privacy. This project revolves around giving the end user back insight and control over what they involuntarily share with the world. We present SnowWall: a networking tool designed to provide insights and control into the networking activity on a Windows-based system. SnowWall interacts with the operating system, intercepts every inbound and outbound connection, provides information on the connection's state, lifetime, owning process, and most importantly, remote end point, such as geolocation and ownership information. SnowWall is a powerful tool designed to be user-friendly, which allows anyone to block unwanted connections with high-level firewall rules, such as blocking by country or by owning organization name.