[HN Gopher] What's next for Tor and privacy online?
___________________________________________________________________
What's next for Tor and privacy online?
Author : fsflover
Score : 149 points
Date : 2023-12-20 17:19 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.torproject.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.torproject.org)
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Is Tor still considered secure? If a single entity controls
| enough entry and exit nodes, I thought it was possible to
| identify users?
|
| Examples:
|
| [1]: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fbi-crack-tor-
| catch-1500-visitors-...
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34412080
|
| [3]: https://www.wired.com/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/
| pphysch wrote:
| The Tor Project is primarily funded by the US State Department
| and DARPA [1], so it is a forgivable error if someone mistook
| TOR for FBI surveillance software.
|
| [1] - https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/
| nacs wrote:
| Tor seem pretty open about where that money is coming from
| and have DARPA and US goverment funds listed here with
| explanations: https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors/
|
| "U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights,
| and Labor The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor
| leads the U.S. efforts to promote democracy, protect human
| rights and international religious freedom, and advance labor
| rights globally."
|
| "DARPA's Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone
| (RACE) program researches technologies for a distributed
| messaging system that can: a) exist completely within a given
| network, b) provide confidentiality, integrity, and
| availability of messaging"
|
| Both of those seem to align with Tor's goals of privacy and
| confidentiality.
| pphysch wrote:
| How does that square with the GP's linked articles that
| allege the FBI "cracked" TOR on multiple occasions?
|
| It strikes me as cognitive dissonance that someone would
| simultaneously distrust the USG for obvious reasons (TFA is
| about Snowden), yet also think they are a perfectly noble
| arbiter of "secure communications", and look the other way
| when copious evidence suggests that the USG has means to
| compromise said "secure communications".
|
| It's a very roundabout way of arguing "if you have nothing
| to hide, you have nothing to fear". TOR is a fine product
| _if_ you aren 't doing anything that the USG would
| realistically prosecute you for.
| kube-system wrote:
| The USG is not a monolith and doesn't operate like one.
| It is composed of many entirely different organizations
| doing different things with different goals.
| pphysch wrote:
| If it were just one agency, sure, but we have evidence
| that State, DARPA, and FBI all have their hands in the
| TOR cookie jar. It would be naive to assume that CIA and
| NSA aren't there too.
|
| Occam's Razor says that TOR is primarily a tool of the
| USG for enabling intelligence & influence operations,
| particularly those involving low-level assets without
| clearances (e.g. color revolutions), and the stuff about
| "consumer privacy" is an unreliable side effect.
| nerdbert wrote:
| Even if they aren't spying on people's TOR traffic, it's
| still useful for spies. The more people are using TOR, the
| easier it is for them to hide their own traffic alongside
| it.
| jstanley wrote:
| What are you going to do? Not use Tor? That's hardly better.
| ravenstine wrote:
| There are alternatives to Tor that have different anonymity
| and routing protocols.
|
| For example, take a look at I2P, which has been around almost
| as long as Tor. It has a lot in common with Tor, but has some
| key differences that may be appealing to some people. I2P
| nodes are capable of implementing something like an exit node
| (often called an "outproxy"), but there's no distinction
| between peers in I2P that designates one as an exit node. The
| project is more oriented towards hidden services,
| implementing its internal network, than it is in anonymizing
| connections to the clearweb. I think it's great that Tor
| exists, but I wish more people would consider I2P or at least
| simultaneously hosting their hidden services on both Tor and
| I2P. And if you _really_ don 't like running a Java runtime,
| Purple I2P exists and is written in C++.
|
| There are also other networks like GNUnet, which slightly
| predates Tor, which is mostly file-sharing oriented, but with
| the goal of anonymity. It can do other things too but, from
| what I can tell, the project never gained much favor
| anywhere. Nevertheless, it still exists and is being worked
| on.
|
| And I can't forget Freenet, or what's not referred to as
| "Hyphanet". I'll just call it Freenet for now because a lot
| of people still remember it. Freenet's focus is not only on
| anonymity but providing a distributed data store that is
| censorship resistant. This at least in part solves the issue
| of having to be online all the time in order to host a hidden
| service. It's been a long time since I've used Freenet, but
| supposedly the community is very good at discouraging crime
| and other unsavory elements. I haven't used the new iteration
| called Hyphanet.
|
| All of these projects have significant differences from Tor,
| and some of these differences are seen by some as fixing
| significant flaws present in the Tor protocol that Tor can't
| reconcile. I2P's design of having no peer distinctions, in my
| opinion, is a vastly superior model for both security and
| plausible deniability. Its routing protocol also makes DDoS
| attacks a greater challenge. Having a primitive yet effective
| implementation of human-readable hostnames is also nice.
|
| All of these projects are available for people to use today.
|
| Tor does have two upsides. The first is that it has a larger
| community. The second is that it has the Tor Browser, which
| I2P does not have an equivalent to, although the Tor Browser
| can be adapted to use I2P.
| mike_hock wrote:
| Just because the FBI used shitty browser exploits that would
| have easily been thwarted by sandboxing the browser properly,
| doesn't mean that Tor is secure.
|
| Running Tor nodes is pocket change for intelligence agencies,
| and a major legal risk for volunteers. It's virtually
| guaranteed that the US intelligence agencies own the majority
| of the network between them. If they were in an arms race with
| foreign intelligence agencies, the number of Tor nodes would be
| exploding.
|
| It's just that the NSA won't lend its shiniest toys to the FBI
| just to bust some CP websites. The lives of children aren't
| worth the risk of exposing and losing a zero-day exploit.
| rockskon wrote:
| Is it a major legal risk for volunteers? In most
| jurisdictions I've only heard of awkward conversations with
| police not familiar with what Tor is, but beyond that? Not
| much outside of jurisdictions that already aren't friendly to
| Tor.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _Is Tor still considered secure?_
|
| Define "secure." Secure from what attackers, in what threat
| model, with what resources devoted to the attack, etc.
|
| There are several categories of attack against Tor, and several
| ways to mitigate them, depending on who you are and what you
| use Tor for.
|
| For a typical end user of Tor, the main one to worry about is
| "browser beaconing" style attacks - where a compromised onion
| website causes the browser to beacon out, on the clearnet, with
| something that links the browser's request on the clearnet to
| the browser's activity on the onion network. If you just use a
| regular browser proxied to Tor, this is a rather high risk, as
| browsers leak all sorts of things (I believe WebRTC was a
| common way of doing it for a while). The solution here is
| Whonix - a multi-VM setup in which your workstation (with a
| stripped down browser) is _only_ connected to a Torification VM
| that routes _all_ inbound traffic over Tor. So, if the browser
| tries to beacon out, it doesn 't matter. Pop open a command
| shell and use ping, it still goes out through Tor. Etc. I
| consider this a reasonable way to use Tor, and any lesser
| construct is probably a dumb idea unless you're using it for
| things like sysadmin where beaconing out doesn't matter. Of
| note, Qubes supports the Whonix configuration as a first party
| sort of setup, and can route all your traffic through Tor,
| should you care.
|
| There's also the risk of traffic correlation for end users, but
| I don't have a sense for the scale of this risk - I wouldn't
| leave long running connections over Tor, but I don't know if it
| matters for "casual use."
|
| If you're hosting hidden services, the "guardian nodes" that
| know your identity are a risk, and given how many nodes seem to
| be run by three letter agencies, you'll want to deeply
| understand Tor and how to protect your services if you're going
| to host something - I believe you can limit guardian nodes to
| those you trust (and run yourself, perhaps?), but that changes
| some of the risk equations in ways I don't fully understand how
| to reason about (not running hidden services that matter - my
| blog has an .onion address, but it's literally just the same
| content as the clearnet version).
|
| And then, we get into the problem that "computers in general"
| could be argued very convincingly to be "not in the slightest
| bit secure against a high level adversary," which is another
| can of worms...
| michaelt wrote:
| Tor is considered as good as anything.
|
| After all, if you suspect the feds control a lot of tor nodes
| you probably also suspect they've infiltrated or outright own
| the major VPNs; that they've got special access to the major
| cloud providers, and that they've got backdoors in things like
| TPMs and remote management agents.
|
| Of course Tor has its problems - exit nodes with trash IP
| reputations, unreliable hidden services, evil exit nodes and
| suchlike. So it's certainly not perfect.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Tor is considered as good as anything.
|
| By who? It's an important question for someone taking this
| advice.
|
| One drawback of Tor is that it attracts attention to you.
| 127361 wrote:
| Team Cymru claim to be able to trace through VPNs using
| widely collected flow records from Internet core routers.
| ISPs sell these flow records to third parties.
|
| So the whole fabric of the Internet itself is one giant spy
| machine, in effect. That sounds like is like it's straight
| out of dystopian fiction, but no, it's for real.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg84yy/data-brokers-
| netflow-...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I wonder if stuff like this can be thwarted by having a
| constant flow of encrypted junk traffic between two parties
| - only replacing the junk with real data (but not changing
| the volume) when they're actively communicating.
|
| Obviously, this doesn't scale for something like social
| media. But metadata regarding one-on-one conversations
| using something like Signal could be effectively obscured.
| 127361 wrote:
| Trouble is it's so difficult to know what your adversary
| is doing, it's better to switch to a different medium
| i.e. reduce dependence on the Internet (as I detailed in
| another post).
|
| The fundamental nature of the Internet itself permits
| this behavior to go unchecked, there is no way for a user
| to know what is happening behind the scenes with
| certainty. We send out our private information (search
| queries, etc.) into this giant black box we have no
| control over. That's the crux of it.
|
| That was not the case with radio or satellite TV, the
| ability to determine what people were listening to or
| watching on a mass scale was nearly impossible due to the
| laws of physics. As the system was completely receive-
| only.
| throwoutway wrote:
| Wasn't expecting to find something amazing from this blog post,
| but this project looks amazing! and has a few big partners behind
| it so I hope it does not vaporware https://onionshare.org/
| beeburrt wrote:
| Micah Lee also made Dangerzone [1] a tool to safely convert
| untrusted pdf files to safe-to-open pdf files, wrote the book
| Hacks, Leaks, and Revalations [2] and he made Tor-Browser-
| Launcher [3] and he's a respected investigative journalist:
| https://micahflee.com/
|
| [1] https://dangerzone.rocks/
|
| [2] https://hacksandleaks.com/
|
| [3] https://github.com/torproject/torbrowser-launcher
| brnt wrote:
| I wish hosting a Tor website was as easy as Onionshare though.
| Start an app, point it at a dir with a rendered static site,
| and hand out the dot-onion to whomever you wish to show it.
|
| I'm thinking: ephemeral websites like Opera Unite used to
| provide, to e.g. share a photo album for as long as you're
| online.
|
| Edit: I should probably say I'm talking about the Android
| version. Which would be so convenient for an appliancy web
| server. The desktop version already do this.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| It seems like there are multiple reactions one can have to
| Snowden type revelations:
|
| 1) "I have nothing to hide" (which isn't quite as bad as it
| sounds - "my security is being a nobody")
|
| 2) "The government shouldn't be spying on people"
|
| 3) "The government shouldn't be spying on people but of course
| they are and you should expect that. Your online privacy is
| essentially your jobs and you shouldn't use services and expect
| them to protect your privacy"
|
| 4) "Even if the state is always actually going to spy on people
| in various fashions, we still don't want to accept and normalize
| this. Forcing the state to 'parallel construction' is better than
| letting the just publicly exhibit all its surveillance since
| normalized surveillance has more of a chilling effect. Moreover,
| institutions have a limited ability to keep their own secrets so
| surveillance is itself going to periodically come into the open
| and when it does, attacking it is useful, again, even if we know
| it will always be an element of modern society".
|
| 5) And you can go on and on... Should we allow enough explicit
| machinery of surveillance to make the state not want to use
| don't-ask-don't-tell third parties (no but..) and so-forth.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > which isn't quite as bad as it sounds
|
| _It is_ as bad as it sounds: not only the apologists of this
| rhetoric believe in the false securities of it themselves, but
| they aggressively try to persuade everyone what if you don 't
| want to be a nobody or have anything what you don't want to
| share with a complete strangers, including the government -
| then you are _doing_ something illegal.
| kube-system wrote:
| It's not so much that digital security isn't important --
| it's that if you are not a "nobody", and you have something
| to hide, digital security is further down your list of your
| worries.
|
| I think too many people think about "digital security" in
| isolation, without any human context or considerations of
| threat profile. Digital security without holistic human
| security is simply a math exercise.
| rixthefox wrote:
| As a addendum to this. I think many of the J6 crowd thought
| the same thing when posts they made online were used in
| evidence against them. You may have nothing to hide, but like
| Snowden said: "Saying you have nothing to hide is like saying
| you don't care about freedom of speech because you have
| nothing to say"*
|
| In both situations there is a loss of privacy and autonomy.
| At some point people just shut down, for the same reasons
| people behave differently when they know they are under
| surveillance verses when they think they're not.
|
| *paraphrasing
| rockskon wrote:
| With point #1.....
|
| I've often been concerned that focuses on the most aberrant and
| rule-breaking of people inevitably broadens the range of the
| scope of behavior that gets targeted over time. When the most
| severe of criminality is less prevalent and easier to detect
| and stop, would law enforcement then not use their remaining
| resources to go after pettier and pettier crimes? What makes
| you think your present behavior will always keep you
| "uninteresting"?
| grammers wrote:
| It's terrifying that basically nothing has changed since the
| Snowden leaks. And most people simply don't care so governments
| can keep scooping up our data, sifting through it for whatever
| they may deem interesting.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| The push for HTTPS everywhere came directly from the Snowden
| revelations, and that is considered a good thing.
|
| Now people are focused on encrypting metadata, so things like
| DNSSEC took off.
|
| There was a recent discussion about how state actors are using
| push notifications to spy on users. Maybe that is the next area
| of improvement.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38543155
| ksjskskskkk wrote:
| https everywhere is literally throwing the baby with the
| bathwater. yeah we got a little better at hiding content,
| still leaking ton of metadata, and still vulnerable to all
| the root CAs in your browser... and lost cache and everything
| else that http had.
| gruez wrote:
| >and still vulnerable to all the root CAs in your
| browser...
|
| certificate transparency makes this very risky to pull off,
| making it all but useless unless you're trying to catch a
| international terrorist or something.
| ksjskskskkk wrote:
| you forget systems have humans in them. most online
| banking scams hijack bank domains and use CAs for that
| country gov, which usually have keys leaked or sold on
| the right (wrong?) places. just look at india or brazil
| list of small govt CA revocations. those are usually CAs
| signed by the CAs in your browser.
|
| so, yeah, a gov abusing this is very bad and visible.
| scammers profiting from the complexity and humans in the
| machine, is very common.
| gruez wrote:
| >most online banking scams hijack bank domains and use
| CAs for that country gov, which usually have keys leaked
| or sold on the right (wrong?) places. just look at india
| or brazil list of small govt CA revocations
|
| Source? If true they're grounds for ejection from root
| certificate programs of various OS/browsers.
| jbotz wrote:
| > https every[where] is literally[1] throwing [out] the
| baby with the bathwater[2].
|
| 1) That would be figuratively, not literally, as there's no
| literal baby in HTTPS-everywhere that I know of.
|
| 2) What is HTTPS-everywhere throwing out? Which part is the
| baby and which is the bathwater? I don't think this is the
| right expresion to use here, not even figuratively.
| ksjskskskkk wrote:
| on 2: caches for one
| dllthomas wrote:
| > no literal baby in HTTPS-everywhere that I know of
|
| Well not anymore. We threw it out.
| jkubicek wrote:
| literally
| verisimi wrote:
| > and lost cache and everything else that http had.
|
| A genuine loss, and also the ability to zip imagery.
| Avamander wrote:
| Was it a loss? I don't think so. It was either
| ineffective, stale or a massive privacy issue. We're
| better off with local caches.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _It was either ineffective, stale_
|
| Because people misconfigured their caching headers,
| didn't use ETags, and wrote buggy caching servers. HTTP's
| actually got quite good support for proxies and caching
| servers, all things considered.
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...
|
| > _or a massive privacy issue_
|
| Again, people misconfiguring their caching headers, and
| buggy caching servers caching things that should not be
| cached. (Though yes, plaintext TCP connections are
| inherently a massive privacy issue.)
|
| > _We 're better off with local caches._
|
| My main web connection used to sit behind a local caching
| proxy, shared with a few thousand other users. It worked
| very well: I never saw anyone else's confidential
| information, I _assume_ they never saw mine, and HTTPS
| was in play. So yeah, HTTP hasn 't robbed us of
| functional caching: it's just opt-in now.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _so things like DNSSEC took off._
|
| DNSSEC doesn't encrypt anything - it's all plaintext on the
| wire. There are some DNS extensions that encrypt the
| query/response (DNS over HTTPS does this), but DNSSEC is not
| that.
|
| DNSSEC is simply a way to verify that the response you get
| has not been meddled with in transit - it's the domain owner
| signing the DNS records so that you can verify that your DNS
| responses aren't being modified by a malicious entity (that
| may very well be your ISP).
| tptacek wrote:
| Yes, they're probably thinking of DoH, which is much, much
| more widely deployed than DNSSEC.
| belorn wrote:
| How are you calculating that?
|
| The number of users of recursive resolvers that support
| DNSSEC vs users of browsers that use DoH? Number of
| companies that has infrastructure that supporting DoH
| compared to number of companies that has infrastructure
| that supporting DNSSEC? Daily users?
| tptacek wrote:
| The right figure of merit should be "lookups protected by
| DoH/DNSSEC" (stipulating that DoH and DNSSEC have
| different definitions of "protected" and just assuming
| arguendo they're the same). I don't think it'd even be
| close; I would assume DoH exceeds DNSSEC by several
| orders of magnitude.
|
| Note that this isn't lookups that _happen to run through
| a resolver with DNSSEC enabled_ ; to count, you'd be
| talking about such a lookup _to a zone that had DNSSEC
| signatures_. You can see the advantage DoH has here,
| since it works with all zones.
| begueradj wrote:
| How Some Governments Eliminate HTTPS/TLS Encryption [1]
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37irG5pKur8
| 127361 wrote:
| However so many sites are using CloudFlare and other DDoS
| prevention and CDN services. I'm sure the NSA has fiber taps
| (beam splitters) at the point where the data travels
| unencrypted on the internal datacenter network.
|
| CloudFlare itself might not even be aware of the taps. Or
| maybe only a few select employees know about it.
|
| I think the solution to these problems is to reduce
| dependence on the Internet. It's now possible to torrent an
| entire library worth of books and have it all on your
| personal computer at home. 20TB HDDs are readily available,
| and constantly getting cheaper. Also check out
| https://reddit.com/r/DataHoarder. And we have local AI
| models, again these do not need the Internet to function.
| apapapa wrote:
| Nothing has changed because we didn't get another leak ... Its
| likely much worst.
| creer wrote:
| Something changed: government agencies are now clear that they
| can carry on, build more of it, and get away with it. Even try
| and build more of it into law (see EU). It was an expensive
| test but successful.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > And most people simply don't care
|
| this is not true and insulting at the same time. Individual
| people are powerless against organized commercial activity,
| and, more than one million people in the USA are on payroll
| with uniform services, so they cannot object.
|
| in addition, the throw-away word "terrifying" is also useless
| and annoying.. really
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Plenty has changed. In general the technology industry cares a
| lot more about security these days. Things have gotten better
| and many services became much more secure by default. WhatsApp
| is the most widely used messaging platform in the world and it
| has end-to-end encryption. It's not ideal but the fact is never
| before have so many people used something this secure. It's
| foiled my country's courts more than once.
|
| What we need now is to get these governments to accept defeat
| and stop trying to undermine our security with constant
| legislative assaults. The fact they keep trying is evidence
| that it's working.
| aborsy wrote:
| It seems that there are at most 10000 Tor nodes.
|
| Are the identity of the node operators known? Do known trusted
| organizations and individuals own the majority of these nodes?
|
| It's indeed expensive and risky for individuals to run Tor notes.
| sdsd wrote:
| I know that Chaos Computer Club used to run a bunch of them.
| And Noisebridge did for a while, but I think they stopped. A
| few universities, too.
|
| I haven't been very active in the space for about a decade, I'd
| also love a more knowledgeable answer
| dpifke wrote:
| See https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/
|
| It's up to individual relay operators whether or not to publish
| contact information. For an example, see one of my relays here:
| https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/w/relay/375DCBB2DBD94E52...
|
| (If you're not an exit relay, it's neither risky nor
| expensive.)
| 127361 wrote:
| Try the I2P anonymous network where by default every user is
| also a router. You can chain the two together, set I2P to use
| an outproxy and set the Tor browser to connect through I2P.
|
| I have no clue as to what security this provides nowadays. I
| predict the NSA or FBI have large scale packet timing
| correlation in operation now. Or the random number generator
| has been compromised, or there are a series of bugs in the Tor
| or I2P implementation itself? I also think there was a human
| compromise of the Tor Project itself 8-9 years ago as well, it
| has been significantly weakened.
|
| Personally I tend to like one-way data broadcasting systems,
| that way the receivers cannot be traced if they are air-gapped,
| e.g. satellite or radio data broadcasting. However nobody
| operates any useful service nowadays. Twenty years ago you
| could receive the whole worldwide Usenet feed with a DVB-S PCI
| card, unencrypted in the clear from a service called Cidera[1].
| It was just UDP multicast packets containing Usenet messages,
| split into fragments with sequence numbers, trivial to reverse
| engineer.
|
| I had this at service home, we had dial-up and with a 55cm
| satellite dish in my bedroom window, I had a 45Mb/s data feed.
| I wrote my own software including a device driver for the DVB-S
| card running under FreeBSD (4.2-RELEASE I believe). Nearly
| 1000x faster than dial up, which was mind-blowing back then.
|
| Also archiving Nostr text messages is interesting, you can get
| the entire worldwide feed of messages from the relays, and then
| search for whatever topic of interest you want in the messages.
| Nobody can tell what you are searching for, unless your
| computer is compromised. I'm thinking about broadcasting these
| by satellite somehow, but satellite bandwidth is very
| expensive. It's just a matter of getting the funds for it.
|
| Reception should be possible using a RTL-SDR or AD9364+USB3.0
| microcontroller[2], and a satellite TV dish. The AD9364 chip
| can be had from AliExpress[3] for $6 now.
|
| 1.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20020806064624/http://www.cidera...
|
| 2. https://www.crowdsupply.com/amungo-navigation/stixrf
|
| 3. https://www.aliexpress.com/i/33017832196.html
| rendx wrote:
| The goal is to _not_ have to trust the node operators, but to
| have as much diversity as possible. They can only deanonymize
| you if all three nodes in one cascade collude.
|
| Running a non-exit node carries very little to no risk.
| throwaway89201 wrote:
| No, you only need to compromise the first node - named the
| entry guard for that reason [1] - and either the exit node or
| ideally the endpoint (hidden) service. Deanonymization is
| then possible by correlating the timing of traffic between
| those two points, as Tor wants to be low-latency, without
| randomly delaying traffic.
|
| For this reason not all nodes may be guard nodes, as decided
| by the directory authorities, and guard nodes are maintained
| for a longer time by the client to reduce the chance that you
| pick a compromised guard node because you switch often. This
| is balanced against the risk that you are unlucky and pick a
| compromised guard at first (which you then maintain for a
| longer time).
|
| The exit node is pretty much assumed to be compromised, as
| it's a role not available to many entities - it requires high
| bandwidth and much teeth-gritting - and the public internet
| is intercepted at large anyway.
|
| [1] https://support.torproject.org/about/entry-guards/
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The reason Tor exists is because of intelligence agencies -
| they literally created it[1]. It makes perfect sense. Agencies
| certainly want to be able to surveil the population at large
| but they want to be able to act anonymously themselves. I mean,
| any fixed entry-point an agency chooses to the Internet is
| going to get a lot of attention. Agencies could mix it up in
| various ways - change entry points, mix their traffic, etc ...
| and the final result looks a lot like Tor. And so yeah, I'm
| sure you have idealistic operators who take heat for running
| nodes but I'd expect the agencies put some resources into
| making sure one way or another that the exit nodes exist.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)#History
| badrabbit wrote:
| Make it a tun interface instead of a socks proxy.
|
| LD_PRELOAD/proxychains for stuff isn't nice or leak proof.
|
| They should also partner with vpn providers so vpn tunnels
| terminate in Tor and exit from it and Tor exits get hosted more
| and more by vpn providers (bit harder to block/classify as a tor
| exit).
|
| Also, a new class of exits that support traffic only to specific
| subnets for sites that are "good" (low abuse potential like bbc,
| wikipedia,news sites,archive sites), these exits can be run out
| of people's residential IPs and phones
| nufonewhodis wrote:
| Hi,
|
| is it possible to mark the packages that leave your house and
| flow into the street using your router or some small device in
| the box that connects the cables from outside going into your
| house?
|
| And could these boxes on the street do a job like that?
|
| I mean, even if I have a DIY network, hard- and software, at
| home, wouldn't it be futile because my encrypted packages, while
| not easily opened, could still be "marked" at any point outside
| my house?! With a prefix or in between the packets? That's what
| someone on the internet means, when they say, the more of us use
| Tor, the better protected the few are and the fewer users surf
| via tor, the less protected whistleblowers and journalists are.
|
| Also: when our packages are encrypted, wouldn't it be possible
| for specific software, say, MS Windows, to pack huge amounts of
| very specific data into some of these packages, that would get
| encrypted in "reengineerable" ways, that are easier to break?
|
| I have a surface-level understanding of the basics of these
| things. Forgive me for not reading up on that stuff, first.
|
| Edit 2: could similar things be done via CPU? I always wondered
| what the disadvantages of Apples way of keeping stuff in RAM
| were. Can the CPU send or safe data about what's in RAM in ways
| that can't be easily tracked via the OS?
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| Is the https://snowflake.torproject.org/ still good. I run the
| extension on everything. My country basically does not block
| anything.
| aborsy wrote:
| Two questions on Tor.
|
| 1. Browsers have become complex, and the users' machines could be
| conceivably compromised through zero days in the browser. How
| does the security of the Tor browser, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and
| Brave compare with one another (in terms of chances of zero
| days)?
|
| 2. Do people here use Tor for everyday use (accessing the
| clearnet, not onion links)?
| Eisenstein wrote:
| 1. If one turns the knob to 'safest' then it will exclude all
| scripting, which leaves few outlets for exploits.
|
| 2. Yes. Everyone should for some portion of their browsing
| time, if only for the reason that when you do need to use it,
| your traffic won't look unusual.
|
| Note that you can think 'paranoid' or 'up to no good' all you
| like, but no one knows the future, and the difference between
| 'paranoia' and 'being prepared' is 'does it affect you or
| others around you in a negative or unhealthy way'.
| belorn wrote:
| > 2. Do people here use Tor for everyday use (accessing the
| clearnet, not onion links)?
|
| I use it almost daily. It is a great tool for sysadmin work,
| and a must for a lot of websites with less-than-honorable
| tracking policy.
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