[HN Gopher] Is Tor still safe to use?
___________________________________________________________________
Is Tor still safe to use?
Author : Sami_Lehtinen
Score : 284 points
Date : 2024-09-18 18:41 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.torproject.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.torproject.org)
| roetlich wrote:
| For context, here's the NDR report:
| https://www.ndr.de/fernsehen/sendungen/panorama/aktuell/Inve...
|
| And more info here: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-
| relays/2024-Septe...
|
| Edit: The NDR alleges a timing attack (no further explanation)
| that allows "to identify so-called 'entry servers'" Very little
| information is actually available on the nature of the attack.
| The NDR claims this method has already lead to an arrest.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Might one mitigating possibility be to use a VPN that uses
| padded and rate limited packets, so that it is always sending
| and receiving _user_defined_ bit rate and your real traffic
| would be traffic shaped to take priority but not exceed the
| padded streams? _Maybe_ this assumes one is running their own
| tor daemon on a server somewhere and the vpn terminates on that
| node. I assume this could be done with _tc sch_htb_ class
| shaping _or perhaps sch_cake_ and tagging packets with iptables
| mangle rules and two never-ending bi-directional rsync streams
| reading /dev/urandom or big random files.
|
| e.g. Port 873 (native rsync) bulk traffic,
| low priority Port 3128 (squid mitm ssl-bump proxy) high
| priority
| cubefox wrote:
| This should be the article linked at the top.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| This isn't written in the most confidence inspiring way
|
| But the things that do inspire confidence:
|
| Tor is updated against vulnerabilities pre-emptively, years
| before the vulnerability is known to be leveraged
|
| Tor Project happens to be investigating the attack vector of the
| specific tor client, which is years outdated
|
| They should have just said "we fixed that vulnerability in 2022"
|
| with a separate article about the old software
| immibis wrote:
| The vulnerability is mitigated by shifting the economic
| incentives, not fixed by making it impossible. It can't be
| fixed without a completely different network design, like in
| Mixminion or Katzenpost. Someone suggested I2P, but it's mostly
| fundamentally the same as Tor. It uses unidirectional tunnels,
| which might help.
| birdman3131 wrote:
| To quote the article. " To the best of our knowledge, the
| attacks happened between 2019-2021." and " This protection
| exists in Ricochet-Refresh, a maintained fork of the long-
| retired project Ricochet, since version 3.0.12 released in June
| of 2022."
|
| While it has been fixed for years it was not a case of using
| old software from what I am reading.
| qwery wrote:
| > confidence inspiring
|
| I don't want them to try to sell me something. If they were
| making bold claims as you suggest I would be _more_ concerned.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| The truth isn't confidence inspiring, the truth can be even
| without selling something, its not here.
|
| There is a risk that the network is compromised at any moment
| and cannot be relied upon, except for your own personal risk
| tolerance on the activity you are interested in.
| basedrum wrote:
| Yeah, but the problem is that they cannot say that with 100%
| confidence, because the details were not shared with them (why,
| I have no idea)
| jstanley wrote:
| The best attack against Tor is convincing people not to use it.
|
| If anyone tries to convince you Tor is not safe, ask yourself:
| cui bono?
| dijit wrote:
| Same was true of Truecrypt.
|
| After the core team disbanded there was a full security audit
| which uncovered some very minor issues.
|
| People never really trusted Veracrypt though. Quite interesting
| how that turned out.
| hypeatei wrote:
| > People never really trusted Veracrypt though
|
| Can you expand on this? It was my understanding that
| Veracrypt is the new de-facto standard.
| dijit wrote:
| Bitlocker, LUKS and FileVault are the new standard(s).
|
| Veracrypt is a curiousity, not beloved the way truecrypt
| was.
|
| I'd love to see hard numbers for this, just my outside
| impression.
|
| In fact, when trying to find old forums that I was part of
| during that era, I failed; and found only this:
| https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/why-people-still-
| believe...
| fencepost wrote:
| IIRC there were a lot more options by the time of the
| Truecrypt-Veracrypt shift. Truecrypt was around when drive
| encryption was otherwise an expensive enterprise software
| thing, but I think Bitlocker was included with Pro versions
| of Windows by the time of Veracrypt so that probably became
| the easiest free option - and probably with better
| compatibility as well.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| this presumes that anyone would trust bitlocker.
|
| https://pulsesecurity.co.nz/articles/TPM-sniffing
| bri3d wrote:
| Being able to sniff a key as it transits a local bus is a
| very different kind of compromise of "trust" than
| believing that something is preemptively backdoored by a
| threat actor. It is deeply mysterious that Microsoft
| don't simply use TPM encrypted sessions to prevent this,
| though.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Isn't this yet another example of if they have your
| physical machine, it's already game over?
| bri3d wrote:
| No? Any modern disk encryption system with a strong
| passphrase (basically, anything but default-BitLocker) is
| very effective against "they have your physical machine
| and it's off" for any known, current adversary. And, the
| basic cryptography in use is common, robust, and proven
| enough that this is probably true even if your tinfoil
| hat is balled quite tightly.
|
| Where modern research effort goes is into protecting
| against "they HAD your physical machine and they gave it
| back to you" or "they got your machine while it was
| on/running" - these are much more difficult problems to
| solve, and are where TEE, TPM, Secure Boot, memory
| encryption, DMA hardening, etc. come into play.
| uncanneyvalley wrote:
| Disagree. If one has physical access to your machine,
| they also have physical access to you. Practically
| everyone is vulnerable to rubber hose cryptanalysis.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Right, because every stolen laptop automatically comes
| with an abduction of the owner? No, getting "hardware
| access" to a human is much harder (more expensive in the
| best case and riskier in terms of drastic punishment)
| than for a laptop, even more so if you want to go
| undetected.
| input_sh wrote:
| How's it free if it's not available in the Home edition of
| Windows?
|
| In fact it's pretty much the only difference between Home
| and Professional editions of Windows these days, so I'd
| price it as the difference between the two (about $60).
| cainxinth wrote:
| The best attack against Tor is creating entrance and exit nodes
| that monitor traffic. That was the biggest risk factor when Tor
| was invented and it still is today.
| theonionrouter wrote:
| How does that work technically, if I am connecting with SSL?
|
| The only thing I see is seeing which IP addresses are using
| Tor, when, and how much traffic exchanged, but mostly it will
| be a bunch of reused residential IPs? If you know who you are
| looking for anyway better to work with their ISP?
|
| With the exit nodes, you know which IP addresses are being
| looked up. You might get an exit node IP when investigating a
| crime say. Raid that person, but can you find anything more?
|
| This isn't an argument, but a question.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| After the Snowden revelations regarding FOXACID and QUANTUM
| going largely undressed in the tor project, people have every
| right to feel sketched out with using ToR for anything. "We're
| still helping people" just isn't a good enough argument for
| most people.
|
| https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/how_the_nsa_a...
| https://blog.torproject.org/yes-we-know-about-guardian-artic...
| xyst wrote:
| Wonder what has replaced "Xkeyscore" given the wide adoption
| of TLS. I know ISPs, especially national ISPs like AT&T (see:
| titanpointe - 33 thomas st, nyc) would feed data to NSA since
| traffic at the time was mostly via http (rather than https).
| I suppose the unencrypted dns queries are still useful
| (although DNSSEC is supposed to defend against snooping/deep
| packet inspection)
| xenophonf wrote:
| DNSSEC is an authentication mechanism. It does not encrypt
| queries or responses.
|
| You might be thinking of DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) or DNS-over-
| TLS (DoT).
|
| There's also DNSCurve.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSCurve
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| DoH and DNSSEC don't use ECH (encrypted client hello)
|
| From what I remember, only DoT uses ECH
|
| https://media.ccc.de/v/chaoscolloquium-1-dns-privacy-
| securit...
| SubzeroCarnage wrote:
| ECH can be used regardless of DoT, DoH, dnscrypt, or
| plain as long as your resolver passes HTTPS queries.
|
| You can easily test this: dig @8.8.8.8 https
| pq.cloudflareresearch.com
| bornfreddy wrote:
| A lot of pages are now behind CF, hosted on AWS,... It
| would surprise me if these providers didn't share their
| data with the 3-letter agencies.
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| I'd argue any data center of cloudflare is just as
| valuable to fiber tap, just like the undersea fiber
| cables.
| greyface- wrote:
| Lots of juicy Internet protocols are still running in
| cleartext. OCSP, for example, and DNS, as you noted. And
| the IP-level metadata of TLS connections is still enough to
| uniquely identify which entities are communicating with
| each other in many situations. I very much doubt XKeyscore
| has been retired.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| >Wonder what has replaced "Xkeyscore" given the wide
| adoption of TLS.
|
| Cloudflare is a US-based company that does MITM attacks on
| all traffic of the websites that it protects. It's part of
| how their DDoS mitigation works.
|
| Many people still use large US-based mail providers such as
| Outlook or Gmail.
|
| Many large services use AWS, GCP or Azure. Perhaps there
| are ways for the NSA to access customers' virtual storage
| or MITM attack traffic between app backends and the load
| balancer where TLS is not used.
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| Worse is how most email providers require SMS
| confirmation or a secondary email.
| sophacles wrote:
| It is MITM, but is it an attack? Literally the website
| owner hires Cloudflare explicity to decrypt and filter
| the traffic. Attack implies that it's unwanted behavior,
| yet the reality seems to imply that its wanted behavior
| by the site owner at a minimum, although continued use of
| the site by visitors also suggests that they want that
| behavior (or they'd go elsewhere).
| treebeard901 wrote:
| >> Wonder what has replaced "Xkeyscore" given the wide
| adoption of TLS.
|
| A nationwide invisible firewall, with man in the middle
| decryption and permanent storage of all unencrypted data.
| All run by the major backbones and ISPs.
| stavros wrote:
| I'll ask the inverse: if Tor is unsafe, who benefits from
| telling you to use it?
| appendix-rock wrote:
| Especially "the solution to an unsafe Tor is more Tor!" it
| feels like I'm at a charity drive.
| theonionrouter wrote:
| "Unsafe" is not enough data.
|
| Safer or unsafer than ISP or VPN, is the question.
|
| (I presume safe means private here)
| supportengineer wrote:
| Society benefits when people refrain from illegal and immoral
| activities.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Are you implying that Tor is primarily used for illegal or
| "immoral" purposes?
| fsckboy wrote:
| are you implying that Tor is not used for illegal or
| immoral purposes? (I took out the primarily that you threw
| in to make your argument stronger because that made my
| argument stronger, and I took out your scare quotes because
| morality doesn't scare me)
| barbazoo wrote:
| I have no idea who is using Tor other than that I heard
| it can be used by people requiring privacy from
| governments, e.g. whistleblowers. It also seems to have
| broad support from the tech industry so I'd be surprised
| if it was in fact primarily used for illegal or "immoral"
| purposes. That's why I'm asking.
| lukan wrote:
| I would assume very likely yes?
|
| There definitely are legit use cases for it and in an ideal
| world, I think all traffic should go over onion routing by
| default to protect them.
|
| But in reality today besides a handful of idealists (like
| me some years ago), and legitimate users, like protestors
| under oppressive regimes - I would assume the biggest group
| with a concrete interest to hide would be indeed pedophiles
| and other dark net members and therefore use it.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| I'm pretty sure many people use Tor for other things than
| journalism and CP.
|
| Tor is a privacy tool. Much of what we do in our lives is
| on the internet, and privacy is important. Tor helps
| people enjoy privacy in a medium that they are
| increasingly dependant on.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Politicians and the powers-that-be benefit from slowly adding
| to the existing pile of what's considered illegal and
| immoral. They build that pile as a levee against threats to
| their power; to maintain the status quo.
|
| Immoral is as subjective as it gets and is therefore an awful
| yardstick.
| jancsika wrote:
| A question before I enter your Manichean universe:
|
| Does Tor Browser Bundle currently ship with Ublock Origin
| installed and on by default?
| duskwuff wrote:
| It would be irresponsible for it to do so. Ad blocker lists
| can inject scripts into web pages which could compromise user
| privacy.
| jancsika wrote:
| In that case we're talking at cross-purposes, so I'll
| reserve judgment.
|
| I'm concerned with what let's call Gorhill's Web-- that is,
| the experience glued together by gorhill's Ublock Origin
| that is viewed by the vast majority of HN commenters on a
| day to day basis.
|
| What you're describing is the Web-based Wasteland that is
| experienced by the vast majority of non-technical users who
| view the web without an ad blocker.
|
| Encouraging Wasteland users to use TBB may well be an
| overall improvement for them. But there are more and more
| popular parts of the web that are practically unusable
| without an ad blocker-- e.g., fake download buttons, myriad
| other ad-based shenanigans, multiple ads squeezed into
| short pieces youtube content that ruins the music, etc. And
| there's an older segment of the population who at I cannot
| in good conscience move away from Gorhill's Web.
|
| If Tor uptake somehow spikes to the point that some
| services can no longer get away with discriminating against
| exit nodes, then great! But in the meantime, I and many
| others have solid reasons for encouraging more and more
| Ublock Origin use among a wide variety of users.
|
| And as you point out, there are _technical_ reasons why the
| ad blocker lists are at odds with TBB design goals. Thus, I
| find the top poster 's "cui bono" comment low effort and
| unhelpful.
|
| Edit: clarification
| knodi123 wrote:
| > If anyone tries to convince you Tor is not safe, ask
| yourself: cui bono?
|
| It could be for insidious reasons, or because the speaker
| legitimately believes it. "If anyone tries to convince you you
| shouldn't use Rot13 as an encryption scheme, ask yourself- cui
| bono?" Silly example, but the point is, just about *everything*
| could be explained equally by either evil lies or honest
| warnings.
| rolph wrote:
| https://github.com/blueprint-freespeech/ricochet-refresh
|
| ...We are writing this blog post in response to an investigative
| news story looking into the de-anonymization of an Onion Service
| used by a Tor user using an old version of the long-retired
| application Ricochet by way of a targeted law-enforcement attack.
|
| ...From the limited information The Tor Project has, we believe
| that one user of the long-retired application Ricochet was fully
| de-anonymized through a guard discovery attack. This was
| possible, at the time, because the user was using a version of
| the software that neither had Vanguards-lite, nor the vanguards
| addon, which were introduced to protect users from this type of
| attack. This protection exists in Ricochet-Refresh, a maintained
| fork of the long-retired project Ricochet, since version 3.0.12
| released in June of 2022.
| nickphx wrote:
| not when you consider the level of monitoring at critical
| internet exchange points..
| andirk wrote:
| That's why we need more bittorrent-like decentralized internet,
| like they were making on the show Silicon Valley.
| nixosbestos wrote:
| Is it possible to "break" the protocol in such a way that Hidden
| Services cannot be used without some version of vanguards? It
| almost seems worth doing?
| valianteffort wrote:
| Federal agencies operate enough exit nodes to make Tor use risky
| at best. I have no idea if they have since implemented some
| feature to prevent this but if not I would stay far away from Tor
| if you're planning to do illegal things. There's also the risk of
| trusting service operators to secure any PII you expose on
| marketplaces.
|
| Not that I think the Fed's would blow their cover to hunt down
| people buying drugs but still seems stupid to trust.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| If they run just the exit node they still can't de-anonymize
| you right?
| system33- wrote:
| Depends on the content of your traffic.
|
| If "deanonymize" strictly means perform a timing attack using
| info you have from the beginning and end of the circuit, then
| by definition you're correct.
|
| But if you visit an identifying set of websites and/or ignore
| TLS errors or ... they can still deanonymize you.
| iluvcommunism wrote:
| What role do TLS errors play in de-anonymizing onion
| traffic?
| system33- wrote:
| My comment is strictly about exit nodes which are not
| used as part of connecting to onion services.
|
| Ignoring TLS errors might mean you're ignoring the fact
| your exit relay is MitM attacking you.
| midtake wrote:
| Monitoring exit nodes does not necessarily reveal hidden
| services, though.
|
| Edit: Never does, exit nodes are not part of the circuit,
| thanks to commenter below.
| system33- wrote:
| Monitoring exits is completely irrelevant to onion services,
| in fact.
|
| Completely.
|
| Exits aren't a part of the circuit. Ever.
| system33- wrote:
| "The western governments run most of the exits" is one of those
| things everybody "knows" but rarely backs up.
|
| The list of all relays is public knowledge by design. There's
| contact information attached to relays. The big operators are
| known individuals and organizations. They contribute. Interact.
|
| Which ones are actually the governments doing bad things
| against their citizens? It's hard to tell? Then why do you make
| such claims?
|
| Relays that observably do bad things are removed from the
| network all the time. Are those ones the government? Tor
| seemingly has a reasonable handle on the situation if that's
| the case.
|
| If the fed is doing correlation attacks, why would they run
| relays at all? "Just" tap the IXPs near major hubs of relays.
| Or heck, get data from the taps you already had. Silent and
| more widespread.
|
| Pushing people away from tor potentially makes it even easier
| to deanonymize them, depending on the adversary model assumed.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Tor was literally developed by the intelligence community.
| I'm sure there are a variety of means to gather actionable
| intelligence from it, with or without the cooperation of the
| exit node volunteers.
|
| Beyond a principled stance re communications, I can't think
| of a reason to use it. If you're planning to resist some
| regime that controls telecom infrastructure, the fact that
| you're using it is both uncommon and notable.
| system33- wrote:
| Tor was literally developed by the Naval Research Lab. Not
| a part of the IC.
|
| I know because I work there. AMA (edit: about tor. Because
| people say a lot about it without actually knowing much.
| But now I should put my phone down so... too late!)
|
| To protect our most sensitive communications and vulnerable
| communities , Tor usage should be normalized so it is
| common and not notable.
| Nathanael_M wrote:
| Unrelated to Tor, what was your favourite project to work
| on that you're allowed to talk about? That must be a
| fascinating job.
| system33- wrote:
| Unfortunately the tor part is the part I can most
| obviously talk about. Not that I work on anything
| classified. I just need to be mindful.
|
| I got to travel to Canada, Mexico, and Europe (from the
| US) for tor meetings and privacy-enhancing technology
| conferences.
|
| More or less every single cell that goes through the tor
| network today is prioritized and scheduled by the cell
| scheduler I wrote.
| amatecha wrote:
| I think if the Tor Project wants to boost their network
| they might try putting anything about how to do so on
| their website, easily-accessible. I'm trying to figure
| out how to run a relay and having a pretty challenging
| time finding anything at all about this. They just really
| want me to download Tor Browser, it seems.
|
| Edit: I finally found it![0] I had to go to Donate,
| Donation FAQ, "Can I donate my time?" , "Learn more about
| joining the Tor community.", and then "Relay Operations"
| -> "Grow the Tor network" at the bottom right. I would
| really hope there's a more direct path than this...
|
| [0] https://community.torproject.org/relay/
| system33- wrote:
| Sorry that it is hard to find. This is the root link to
| point you towards.
|
| https://community.torproject.org/relay/
|
| Thanks for considering to run a relay.
| amatecha wrote:
| No prob - and thanks! Looks like I found it right as you
| were drafting this message. It would be really useful to
| add some call to action about "Help grow the Tor
| network!" anywhere on the home page. Partly just to
| increase the "welcoming-ness" but mostly to reduce
| friction for ppl who want to contribute, and help make it
| clear that the network needs support from whoever :)
| Jach wrote:
| I still think the IC, and especially the state
| department, benefits from having Tor fulfill its actual
| design goals most of the time. There are operations and
| state department goals that can benefit from Tor working
| properly. It's the same with encryption in general -- the
| IC benefits from there being strong and bug-free crypto
| implementations. That they have in the past backdoored
| some of them doesn't change that they've also hardened
| others. I'm sure they come up with and deploy various
| attacks on Tor all the time, same with foreign nations
| (whom the state department would like to thwart). I'm
| skeptical though that they can do working attacks at any
| time and against any set of people.
|
| For your AMA, if you want: How's the job? What keeps you
| working there? How's patriotism these days?
| system33- wrote:
| The job these days is boring but secure. Tor stuff was
| more exciting, then I switched teams because grass-is-
| greener.
|
| At least for the teams I have been on and my view of
| leadership, there is very little political talk.
|
| But patriotism isn't politics... lol. The higher you get
| the more "hoo rah America!" is a part of the motivational
| speech or report or whatever. Down here in the streets
| it's just another job. Pride in the country isn't much of
| a driver. At least for me.
| pushupentry1219 wrote:
| > Tor was literally developed by the intelligence
| community. I'm sure there are a variety of means to gather
| actionable intelligence from it, with or without the
| cooperation of the exit node volunteers.
|
| These two statements make little sense together. It was
| originally developed by the Navy. Okay. So why would they
| design it from the get-go with such a fatal flaw that would
| risk their own adversaries gathering "actionable
| intelligence" from it?
|
| I'd like to stress if we're talking about the Navy's
| involvement, then you're questioning the design of the
| whole thing from the very beginning, not just the current
| implementation.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > "The western governments run most of the exits" is one of
| those things everybody "knows" but rarely backs up.
|
| Thanks for pointing this out. Seems obvious in retrospect but
| I don't really recall seeing a lot of evidence for this
| despite seeing the claim quite commonly. That said, the use
| of "rarely" makes me wonder what evidence has been presented
| in such rare instances. Just curious. (Of course it's also
| fine if the phrasing was just communication style.)
| 0xggus wrote:
| Please read the blog post:"It is important to note that Onion
| Services are only accessible from within the Tor network, which
| is why the discussion of exit nodes is irrelevant in this
| case."
| LouisSayers wrote:
| You'd be surprised how much crime goes on in plain sight. There
| are literally people on Instagram making stories of themselves
| showing off their drugs and stacks of money.
|
| Given that a lot of law enforcement doesn't even bother with
| the low hanging crimes, the chance of them prosecuting anyone
| using Tor is extremely low unless you get big enough or go far
| enough to warrant the attention.
| smileson2 wrote:
| Depends on your risk, if are are trying to avoid censorship and
| political repression in say Iran or china you are probably fine
|
| If you are an enemy of the United States you probably aren't but
| that's a high bar
| Yawrehto wrote:
| Maybe. I think the real distinction is reach. Are you consuming
| content passively, or are you creating content for many people?
| If you're creating content on torture China's doing, they
| absolutely will track you down. If you're in North Korea and
| revealing what life is really like in South Korea, or in Russia
| exposing the realities of the Ukraine war, Tor is probably
| unsafe.
|
| But there is also an element of resources. Even if you're
| sowing distrust in, say, the Comorian government, I don't think
| they have the resources to go after you unless you are truly
| destabilizing and not just annoying.
| smileson2 wrote:
| Yes fair point
| GaggiX wrote:
| It depends, are you dealing with Mossad or not Mossad?
| 0xf00ff00f wrote:
| Hah, I was reminded of that essay while reading about recent
| events.
|
| "If the Mossad wants your data, they're going to use a drone to
| replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that's shaped
| like a cellphone."
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Here is what I don't understand: Let's say I as a private
| individual fund 1000 tor nodes (guard and exit nodes included)
| and have them all log everything. This could cost less than $5000
| for a month, with some time needed to get guard node status.
|
| I want to find a certain kind of person so I look for people that
| access a specific hidden service or clearnet url.
|
| Surely eventually I'm going to get a hit where all three nodes in
| the circuit are my nodes that are logging everything? It will
| take a long time, and I can't target a specific person, but
| eventually I can find someone who has all three bounces through
| tor nodes I control, no?
| gaba wrote:
| Tor Project has a team that looks at relays and checks if
| relays are engaging in bad practices or any suspicious activity
| like a lot of nodes run by one operator.
|
| https://community.torproject.org/relay/governance/
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Iran probably has enough money that it could pay a thousand
| different isps in a thousand different ways with a thousand
| different os versions and tor versions. This could all be
| automated pretty easily.
| krunck wrote:
| When you think about countries that have the resources to
| "pay a thousand different isps in a thousand different ways
| with a thousand different os versions and tor versions"
| your first thought was Iran?
| alasdair_ wrote:
| My first thought was actually "I could probably do that
| myself given some motivation"
|
| Hiring people on something like fiverr could take care of
| most of the manual part.
|
| My point is that if I could do it, a nation state
| cracking down on dissidents could likely do it too.
| hnisoss wrote:
| how do you protect yourself from botnets? lets say just
| monkrus release was infected and now N-thousand teens are
| running infested windows installations and software tools..
| construct0 wrote:
| Yes, there aren't that many tor nodes. It's not the safe haven
| protocol or transport suite people make it out to be.
| system33- wrote:
| It's then best we've got for achieving actually meaningful
| privacy and anonymity. It has a huge body of research behind
| it that is regularly ignored by those coming up with sexy or
| off-the-cuff alternatives.
|
| It's the most popular so it gets the most attention: from
| academics, criminals, law enforcement, journalists, ...
| beeflet wrote:
| Why not just have greater number of relays by default?
| Internet bandwidth tends to increase over time, and the
| odds of this correlation attack are roughly proportional to
| the attacker's share of relays to the power of the number
| of relays used.
|
| So latency issues permitting, you would expect the default
| number of relays to increase over time to accommodate
| increases in attacker sophistication. I don't think many
| would mind waiting for a page to load for a minute if it
| increased privacy by 100x or 1000x.
| system33- wrote:
| If you're advocating for a bigger network... we need more
| relay operators. Can't wave a magic wand. There's like
| 8000 relays. Haven't looked in a while.
|
| Or if you were arguing for increasing the number of
| relays in a circuit, that doesn't increase security. It's
| like one of the OG tor research papers deciding on 3. Bad
| guy just needs the first and the last. Middle irrelevant.
| beeflet wrote:
| >Or if you were arguing for increasing the number of
| relays in a circuit, that doesn't increase security. It's
| like one of the OG tor research papers deciding on 3. Bad
| guy just needs the first and the last. Middle irrelevant.
|
| Because of timing attacks? There are ways to mitigate
| timing attacks if you are patient (but I think clearnet
| webservers are not very patient and my drop your
| connection)
| system33- wrote:
| Yes timing attacks.
|
| And yeah mitigation gets you into a huge body of research
| that's inconclusive on practical usability. Eg so much
| overhead that it's too slow and 10 people can use a 1000
| relay network and still get just 1 Mbps goodput each.
| Contrived example.
|
| People need to actually be able to use the network, and
| the more people the better for the individual.
|
| There's minor things tor does, but more should somehow be
| done. Somehow...
| meowfly wrote:
| Any idea what consideration keeps the tor team from
| making the client also act as a relay node by default?
| system33- wrote:
| Clients aren't necessarily good relays. Reachability.
| Bandwidth. Uptime. I'll-go-to-prison-if-caught-and-idk-
| how-to-change-settings-this-needs-to-just-work.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| >It's then best we've got for achieving actually meaningful
| privacy and anonymity
|
| ...while being practical.
|
| One could argue that there is i2p. But i2p is slow, a
| little bit harder to use, and from what I can remember,
| doesn't allow you to easily browse the clearnet (regular
| websites).
| appendix-rock wrote:
| These sort of "Tor evangelism" comments are so tiring,
| frankly. There are quite a few like it in this thread, in
| response to...not people poo-pooing Tor, or throwing the
| baby out with the bathwater, rather making quite level-
| headed and reasonable claims as to the shortcomings and
| limitations of the network / protocol / service / whatever.
|
| One should be able to make these quite reasonable
| determinations about how easy it'd be to capture and
| identify Tor traffic without a bunch of whataboutism and
| "it's still really good though, ok!" replies which seek to
| unjustifiably minimise valid concerns because one feels the
| need to...go on and bat for the project that they feel some
| association with, or something.
|
| The self-congratulatory cultiness of it _only_ makes me
| quite suspicious of those making these comments, and if
| anything further dissuades me from ever committing any time
| or resources to the project.
| basedrum wrote:
| it was used by Snowden to leak documents...
| ObsidianBreaks wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree, the 'dragnet' methodology is already
| documented and well-known and that should factor into your
| security assessments.
| scraptor wrote:
| If your nodes disclose their affiliation that's fine but the
| client will avoid using multiple. If you try to do this in
| secret the tor project will attempt to catch you by looking for
| suspicious nodes that use the same isp and update their tor
| version at the same time and things like that, to questionable
| success.
| pushupentry1219 wrote:
| But an adversary with enough money could just buy servers
| from multiple ISPs, right?
| vkou wrote:
| State-level actors (five eyes) should have no problem with
| avoiding that kind of detection.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > Surely eventually I'm going to get a hit where all three
| nodes in the circuit are my nodes that are logging everything?
|
| If you're looking for static assets, why would you need to see
| the whole chain? Wouldn't a connection to a known website
| (page) have a similar fingerprint even if you wrap it in 3
| layers of encryption? Does Tor coalesce HTTP queries or
| something to avoid having someone fingerprint connections based
| on the number of HTTP requests and the relative latency of each
| request?
|
| I've always assumed that, if a global adversary attack works,
| you'd only need to watch one side if you're looking for
| connections to known static content.
|
| I don't know much beyond the high level idea of how Tor works,
| so I could be totally wrong.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| ? tor reroutes the packets so how would you identify who is
| visiting who? it's not just 'layers of encryption' it is
| layers of redirection
| donmcronald wrote:
| If I visit facebook.com it's about 45 requests and 2.5MB of
| data. Are you saying that if I did that via Tor I would get
| a different circuit for each request or each individual
| packet?
|
| Eventually the guard has to send the whole payload to me,
| right? Wouldn't that look similar every time if there's no
| obfuscation?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| you mean inferring the website based on packet traffic
| pattern if you are the guard? yeah maybe possible, not
| sure how distinct each website footprint would be in
| practice
|
| seems like it would also be challenging to hold up in
| actual legal proceedings
| donmcronald wrote:
| > you mean inferring the website based on packet traffic
| pattern if you are the guard?
|
| Yeah, basically, but I was thinking that if you're
| analyzing a pattern going to the client, all you'd need
| is any point between the guard and the client (ie: an
| ISP).
| alasdair_ wrote:
| If I don't know the whole chain (or I don't use a timing
| attack with a known guard and exit node) then I don't see how
| I'd know who sent the packet in the first place. The person
| in the chain would connect to a random tor guard node, which
| would connect to another random node which would connect to
| my evil exit node. My evil exit node would only know which
| random TOR node the connection came from but that's not
| enough to tell who the original person was.
| donmcronald wrote:
| Say there are only 2 sites on Tor. Site 'A' is plain text
| and has no pages over 1KB. You know this because it's
| public and you can go look at it. Site 'B' hosts memes
| which are mostly .GIFs that are 1MB+. You know this because
| it's also a public site.
|
| If I was browsing one of those sites for an hour and you
| were my guard, do you think you could make a good guess
| which site I'm visiting?
|
| I'm asking why that concept doesn't scale up. Why wouldn't
| it work with machine learning tools that are used to detect
| anomalous patterns in corporate networks if you reverse
| them to detect expected patterns.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| The point is that there aren't only two sites available
| on the clearnet. Is the idea that you find a unique file
| size across every single site on the internet?
|
| My understanding (that may be totally wrong) is that
| there is some padding added to requests so as to not be
| able to correlate exact packet sizes.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > Is the idea that you find a unique file size across
| every single site on the internet?
|
| Not really. I'm thinking more along the lines of a total
| page load. I probably don't understand it well enough,
| but consider something like connecting to facebook.com.
| It takes 46 HTTP requests.
|
| Say (this is made up) 35 of those are async and contain
| 2MB of data total, the 36th is consistently a slow
| blocking request, 37-42 are synchronous requests of 17KB,
| 4KB, 10KB, 23KB, 2KB, 7KB, and 43-46 are async (after 42)
| sending back 100KB total.
|
| If that synchronous block ends up being 6 synchronous TCP
| connections, I feel like that's a pretty distinct pattern
| if there isn't a lot of padding, especially if you can
| combine it with a rule that says it needs to be preceded
| by a burst of about 35 connections that transfer 2MB in
| total and succeeded by a burst of 4 connections that
| transfer 100KB combined.
|
| I've always assumed there's the potential to fingerprint
| connections like that, regardless of whether or not
| they're encrypted. For regular HTTPS traffic, if you
| built a visual of the above for a few different sites,
| you could probably make a good guess which one people are
| visiting just by looking at it.
|
| Dynamic content getting mixed in might be enough
| obfuscation, but for things like hidden services I think
| you'd be better off if everything got coalesced and
| chunked into a uniform size so that all guards and relays
| see is a stream of (ex:) 100KB blocks. Then you could let
| the side building the circuit demand an arbitrary amount
| of padding from each relay.
|
| Again, I probably just don't understand how it works, so
| don't read too much into my reply.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| >Surely eventually I'm going to get a hit where all three nodes
| in the circuit are my nodes that are logging everything?
|
| The word "eventually" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
| Let's say you actually manage to add 1000 servers to the tor
| network somehow without getting detected. The network currently
| sits at just under 8000 nodes. For simplicity, lets also ignore
| that there are different types of nodes and geographical
| considerations and instead just ask what is the probability
| that someone randomly chooses three nodes that you own. The
| answer is less than 0.14%. If that someone decided to use 4
| nodes to be extra-safe, that number goes down to 0.015%. And it
| decreases exponentially for every additional relay he adds.
| Combine this with the fact that tor nodes are actively
| monitored and regularly vetted for malicious behaviour[1], and
| these attacks become increasingly difficult. Could someone like
| the NSA with limitless resources do it? Quite probably, sure.
| But could you or any other random guy do it? Almost certainly
| not.
|
| [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-
| health/team/-/wiki...
|
| Edit: For all the cynics and doomsayers here, consider this:
| Tor has been around for a long time, but there has never been
| an uptick in arrests that could be correlated to cracking the
| core anonymity service. If you look closely at the actual high
| profile cases where people got busted despite using tor, these
| people always made other mistakes that led authorities to them.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Could someone like the NSA with limitless resources do it?
| Sure
|
| Yes, this is obviously the sort of adversary we would be
| discussing.
|
| > , lets also ignore that there are different types of nodes
|
| causing your number to be an underestimate
|
| > The answer is less than 0.14%.
|
| So almost certainly thousands of people
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| >Yes, this is obviously the sort of adversary we would be
| discussing.
|
| OP explicitly asked about himself, not some government
| organisation.
|
| >causing your number to be an underestimate
|
| Not necessarily. It might even be an overestimate if the
| attacker fails to supply enough nodes of the right kind.
|
| >So almost certainly thousands of people
|
| We're talking about a targeted attack. Of course the
| statistics game works better when you don't target specific
| people and just fish randomly. But there are probably more
| cost effective methods as well.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > We're talking about a targeted attack
|
| From OP: " I can't target a specific person, but
| eventually I can find someone who has all three bounces
| through tor nodes I control, no"
|
| > Not necessarily. It might even be an overestimate if
| the attacker fails to supply enough nodes of the right
| kind.
|
| Assuming they match the existing distribution of nodes,
| they will only have better results.
| mzs wrote:
| So if there are greater than only 357 people on topics the GP
| is interested in that's better than 50/50 odds.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >The answer is less than 0.14%.
|
| Is this per circuit? So if someone switches circuits every X
| hours, the chance of being caught after a year is actually
| quite high?
|
| And even catching 0.14% of pedophiles would probably be worth
| it to the FBI or whatever, nevermind Iran catching dissidents
| or whatever.
|
| My point is that is seems very cheap to do this (I as a
| random staff engineer could do it myself) and catch _some_
| people. A nation state could easily catch a much higher
| percentage if they increased the number of logging nodes
| slowly and carefully and deliberately did things like use
| many isps and update the servers gradually etc.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The happy equilibrium is that if you have enough adversary
| nation-state intelligence services doing this and not
| sharing information, they'll cancel each other out and
| provide free node hosting.
| qwery wrote:
| You're misusing probability and ignoring critical
| information.
|
| There's 1000 red marbles added to a jar with 8000 blue
| marbles (9000 total). Take three marbles from the jar
| randomly, one at a time. The odds of getting three red
| marbles is ~0.14%. That's all.
|
| Tor nodes are not randomly picked marbles. The Tor network
| is not a jar.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| they're using probability correctly. if you have a
| critique state it clearly
| PeterisP wrote:
| If someone would do the thing-to-be-detected (e.g. accessing
| CSAM) every day, then that 0.14% probability of detection
| turns out to be 40% for a single year (0.9986^365) or 64%
| over two years, so even that would deanonymize the majority
| of such people over time.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| That assumes you could run thousands of malicious tor nodes
| for several years without being detected. Unless you have
| vast resources and time, this is unlikely.
| mistercheph wrote:
| I can't think of anyone with vast resources and time that
| would want to deanonymize cybercriminals
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Top commenter specifically asked about himself.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Outside of 3 letter agencies which is obvious, I have
| known people who would do this for fun or whatever other
| personal motivation.
|
| A lot of "hacker" mentality projects involve putting a
| tremendous amount of effort into something with
| questionable utility.
|
| People climb mountains because they're there.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| But it doesn't seem unfeasible for a state actor that
| wants to track their population then?
| ziddoap wrote:
| The comment that spawned this chain starts with:
|
| > _Let 's say I as a private individual_
| alasdair_ wrote:
| My point is that it doesn't require "vast resources". A
| VPS is $5 a month. A thousand of them would be in the
| disposable income budget of a single FAANG engineer never
| mind a nation state.
|
| Pay people on Fiverr to set them up for you at different
| ISPs so that all the setup information is different. You
| can use crypto to pay if you want anonimity (this is
| actually the main reason I used to use bitcoin - I'd pay
| ISPs in Iceland to run TOR exit nodes for me without
| linking them to my identity).
|
| This isn't a difficult problem. A single individual with
| a good job could do it.
|
| And sure, each connection only has a very small chance of
| being found, but aggregate it over a year or two and you
| could catch half of the users of a site if they connected
| with a new circuit one time per day.
|
| I honestly can't see why a nation state or two hasn't
| already done this.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| > A VPS is $5 a month.
|
| With insignificant data caps. To get the data needed I
| believe you're looking at a couple hundred a month, to
| start.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Running exit nodes is also likely to result in getting
| booted from most VPS or even bare metal providers, maybe
| unless you BYOIP.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| And if you BYOIP, and run a large node, Tor volunteers
| will try to contact you and verify...
| Spivak wrote:
| But given the attack is just logging the cleartext at the
| ends how are you going to detect that the servers are
| malicious?
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| What detection? A malicious node is only different from a
| non-malicious node because all the traffic is being
| logged. If that's our definition of a malicious node in
| this case then there is no way to detect one.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _What detection?_
|
| Not speaking to the effectiveness of the detection (it's
| hard!), but there's information available, for example:
|
| https://blog.torproject.org/malicious-relays-health-tor-
| netw...
|
| https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-
| health/team/-/wiki...
|
| https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-
| health/team/-/wiki...
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| You don't need all the middle nodes. Just the entry and exit,
| and enough data to do packet timing analysis to correlate
| them. It's in fact shockingly easy for a well provisioned
| actor to trace tor traffic, and this is something the TOR
| project openly admits.
|
| They're financed by the US Government after all...
| basedrum wrote:
| Tor does have padding defenses to protect against that.
|
| Also, according to their latest blog post on their
| finances, while it is true they have money from the US
| Government, that was only ~50% of their income (I think
| that was 2023). For the FUD part of that comment, see the
| "U.S. Government Support" section of
| https://blog.torproject.org/transparency-openness-and-
| our-20...
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| "Only half" is hilarious. Thanks for that.
|
| And if you trust the NSA can't overcome correlation in
| the presence of "padding defenses", then sure: TOR is
| secure.
| oconnore wrote:
| > Could someone like the NSA with limitless resources do it?
| Quite probably, sure.
|
| If you're not worried about a fairly well-resourced
| government agency uncovering whatever network activity you
| believe needs to be anonymized, why would you be using Tor at
| all?
| echoangle wrote:
| Depends on what you're doing. The NSA isn't going to expose
| themselves by tipping off law enforcement about small time
| drug deals. If you're sharing CSAM or planning terrorist
| attacks, it might be different.
| stackghost wrote:
| >If you're sharing CSAM or planning terrorist attacks, it
| might be different.
|
| They'll just employ parallel construction to avoid
| exposure.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| Because you're an enemy of the Iranian, Saudi, North
| Korean, etc. gov't.
|
| Because your ex-spouse wants to murder you.
|
| Because you just escaped Scientology, or another cult.
|
| Because you're a criminal. The NSA doesn't handle that.
|
| Because you're a journalist talking to sources in the
| industry you're investigating.
| adamrezich wrote:
| Those second and third points are pretty laughably
| paranoid-fantasy reasons to use Tor--even if one found
| oneself in either situation.
| throwme0827349 wrote:
| Respectfully, a large number of people rightfully fear
| for their lives, safety, and freedom due to being stalked
| or abused by a current or former partner. I have
| personally known several.
|
| Using victims' devices and communications in order to
| locate, and then harass, trap, or attack them, is
| commonplace for stalkers.
| adamrezich wrote:
| How many of these people are justified (by evidence, not
| merely paranoia) in thinking that Tor would circumvent
| whatever communications interception may or may not have
| been put in place?
|
| And of those people, how many people have ever even heard
| of Tor, let alone know how to use it?
| throwing_away wrote:
| I think you just unintentionally highlighted the need for
| the tor project and outreach to inform people about it.
| adamrezich wrote:
| Not to make too much light of a morbid topic but the idea
| of someone having a murderous yet tech-savvy ex who has
| methodically installed all sorts of elaborate digital
| surveillance measures in their former spouse's personal
| tech stack in service of premeditated homicide, sitting
| in a dark room somewhere, howling in anger upon realizing
| his murder plan has (somehow...?) been thwarted by said
| former spouse unexpectedly using Tor is pretty funny
| (because of how outlandish it is). "I almost got away
| with it too, if it weren't for you kids and that onion
| routing software!"
| yazzku wrote:
| It's like a series of onions!
| derefr wrote:
| You know what's easier than waiting around to get really
| lucky?
|
| Using those same network-health dashboards as DDoS target
| lists, to temporarily degrade/shut down the whole network
| except for your own nodes.
|
| Also, big nodes route more Tor circuits each. Costs more to
| run them, and they intentionally don't function as exit nodes
| (to avoid the "obvious" attack) -- but just having a bunch of
| these big nodes in the network handling only middle hops,
| biases the _rest_ of the network _away_ from handling middle
| hops, toward handling end hops. Which means that if you then
| run a ton of tiny nodes...
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >Edit: For all the cynics and doomsayers here, consider this:
| Tor has been around for a long time, but there has never been
| an uptick in arrests that could be correlated to cracking the
| core anonymity service. If you look closely at the actual
| high profile cases where people got busted despite using tor,
| these people always made other mistakes that led authorities
| to them.
|
| Yeah, the stated reason is always something else. But this
| just reminds me of "parallel construction" - what if they
| were found in on way and then (to hide the source) the claim
| was that they were found in another way?
| throwaway37821 wrote:
| 75% [0] of all Tor nodes are hosted within 14 Eyes [1]
| countries, so it would actually be quite trivial for the NSA
| to de-anonymize a Tor user.
|
| It baffles me that Tor Browser doesn't provide an easy way to
| blacklist relays in those countries.
|
| [0] Here, you can do the math yourself:
| https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#aggregate/all
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Fourteen_Eyes
|
| > Edit: For all the cynics and doomsayers here, consider
| this: Tor has been around for a long time, but there has
| never been an uptick in arrests that could be correlated to
| cracking the core anonymity service. If you look closely at
| the actual high profile cases where people got busted despite
| using tor, these people always made other mistakes that led
| authorities to them.
|
| Maybe someone, somewhere, has decided that allowing petty
| criminals to get away with their crimes is worth maintaining
| the illusion that Tor is truly private.
|
| It's also worth noting that it's significantly easier to find
| the mistakes someone has made that could lead to their
| identity _if you already know their identity._
| halfcat wrote:
| > _there has never been an uptick in arrests_
|
| If it was effective, would there have been a down tick in
| arrests at some point?
|
| Or if the arrest rate stayed the same, would that suggest it
| never "worked" to begin with?
|
| It's like the movie trope of the detective who finds out the
| truth via some questionable means which isn't admissible in
| court. When you know the truth you can push harder and call
| every bluff until you get admissible evidence.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Or you can use more... underhanded means that never result
| in an arrest.
| panarky wrote:
| _> what is the probability that someone randomly chooses
| three nodes that you own. The answer is less than 0.14%._
|
| You calculated the probability that _a specific person_
| randomly chooses three nodes of the 1,000.
|
| But that's not the scenario you're responding to.
|
| _> > I can't target a specific person, but eventually I can
| find someone who has all three bounces through tor nodes I
| control_
|
| Tor estimates that 2.5 million people use the network per
| day.
|
| Let's assume that in a month, 10 million people use it.
|
| Let's also assume that 80% of monthly users are not
| committing crimes, while the 20% who are criminals make an
| average of four Tor connections per month.
|
| With those assumptions we could expect a malicious operator
| who controls 1,000 nodes could capture the sessions of 10,940
| criminals in a given month.
|
| Spending less than fifty cents per suspect is less than
| trivial.
| itake wrote:
| 1/ if a user sends 10,000 requests, you're saying 14 of them
| might see 3 compromised nodes?
|
| 2/ Police can use parallel construction. Although, given
| enough time (in theory) parallel construction is eventually
| exposed.
| verbify wrote:
| > Edit: For all the cynics and doomsayers here, consider
| this: Tor has been around for a long time, but there has
| never been an uptick in arrests that could be correlated to
| cracking the core anonymity service. If you look closely at
| the actual high profile cases where people got busted despite
| using tor, these people always made other mistakes that led
| authorities to them.
|
| During WW2, the British cracked the German codes. They would
| create pretexts for "discovering" where German ships would
| be, so that the Germans wouldn't suspect that they cracked
| their codes.
|
| It's impossible for us to know if the US government have
| cracked Tor, because the world would look identical to us
| whether they had or hadn't. If the only evidence they have is
| via Tor, and the individual is a small fry, they will prefer
| they get away with it rather than let people know that Tor
| has been cracked.
|
| I just assume the NSA are spending their budgets on
| something, although maybe it is stuff like side channel
| attacks.
| jeffbee wrote:
| This attack is quite practical. In 2007 I controlled a huge
| chunk of Tor traffic from 2 racks of cheap servers in a
| basement on Folsom Street in SF. It was easy to arrange and
| nobody noticed. Yeah those were early days for Tor but I don't
| think scale changes anything. If you're using Tor because you
| think it is private, you have fooled yourself.
| londons_explore wrote:
| You only need to control the entry and exit node - since you
| know the next and previous hop for all traffic you touch, and
| default chains are 3 long. With circuits changing every 10
| mins, within a few days you would have deanonymized at least
| some percentage of traffic for nearly every user.
|
| I'd call tor broken against any adversary with a little
| technical skill and willingness to spend $5000.
|
| I'm 80% sure Tor is designed as a US supported project to focus
| those needing anonymity into a service only governments with
| global security apparatus (who can grab a good chunk of
| internet traffic) can access.
| k__ wrote:
| How do you control an exit node?
|
| I had the impression, with onion services they are a thing of
| the past.
| londons_explore wrote:
| https://blog.torproject.org/tips-running-exit-node/
| k__ wrote:
| Ah, there are people who use Tor to access non-onion
| services. Got it.
|
| Seemed like onion services were created to solve the
| security issues that exit nodes bring, so I assumed
| people stopped using them and started running onion
| services instead.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| For the more scummier or illegal elements on the network,
| that is true. For onion services, lasering attacks and
| takeovers plus honeypot are the chief danger.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| I imagine most exit nodes are likely controlled by the US
| government and/or its close allies. Who else wants to have
| their IP address banned from most of the internet and
| potentially get visits from their country's equivalent of the
| FBI?
|
| If most Tor users ran exit nodes and most people used Tor, it
| would effectively make internet traffic anonymous. But
| without those network effects, it is vulnerable by design to
| deanonymization attacks by state actors.
| basedrum wrote:
| I run an exit node, and I know several people who do, I
| dont suspect any of them to be anything but people who care
| about privacy, surveillance, and helping people get access
| to the free internet from restrictive locations. I admit, I
| bristled at your comment, because I do not like myself, the
| EFF, and many of my close friends being imagined as part of
| the US Government.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I ran an exit node for a while, and found myself auto-
| banned from so many services that I stopped running the
| node and threw away my IP range (which now would be worth
| $$$ - oh well!)
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| The skilled labor to set that all up, especially in a way that
| TOR won't notice and shut you down will be worth much much more
| than $5k.
|
| People that have such a sophisticated and resourced team
| actively hunting them down, likely know about it, and are using
| many additional layers of security on top of TOR. Even just for
| personal use out of curiosity to "see what the darkweb is," I
| used 1-2 additional methods on top of TOR.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > used 1-2 additional methods on top of TOR
|
| Curious: what did you do and what were you hoping to
| mitigate?
| jiveturkey wrote:
| It'd be ten times that cost, easily. You have to buy data
| volume.
|
| Also since you aren't targetting specific people, rather
| specific interests, it'd be easier to setup an irresistible
| site serving content of the vice of interest. It can even be a
| thin wrapper on existing sites. Do you only need to control
| entry nodes in that case? You'll return user-identifying data
| in headers or steganographically encoded in images and since
| you control the entry node you can decrypt it. It doesn't work
| for a normal (unaffiliated) entry node but since your entry
| node is in collusion with the server I think this works.
| prisenco wrote:
| Using Tor, like all security and privacy tools, must be
| balanced against what it is being used for. We will always live
| in a world of limited resources for policing, and systems of
| privacy work by increasing the difficulty and cost to
| deanonymize someone. They don't have to be perfect, they just
| have to be expensive.
|
| If you want basic anonymity while researching someone powerful
| or accessing information, it's extremely unlikely anyone is
| going to go the lengths people are bringing up here as a way to
| compromise Tor. The intersection of expertise, funding and time
| required is too great for such a low value target.
|
| If you're an international terrorist leader wanted in multiple
| countries, a prolific criminal, or enemy #1 of an authoritarian
| state though? Those who can go to those lengths absolutely will
| go to those lengths.
| bragr wrote:
| >This could cost less than $5000 for a month
|
| I ran a bunch of nodes for a couple years and that's optimistic
| by perhaps an order of magnitude. No $5 a month VPS provides
| enough bandwidth to sustain the monthly traffic of a Tor node,
| and nodes need to be continuously online and serving traffic
| for about 2-3 months[1] before they will be promoted to guard
| relays. Throttling traffic to stay in your bandwidth allocation
| will just get you marked as a slow node and limit the number of
| connections you get
|
| [1] https://blog.torproject.org/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay/
| plorg wrote:
| You didn't think someone would notice if the Tor has 1000 new
| nodes setup similarly? Or, I suppose, if you find enough people
| and pay them to log their nodes, you're not going to get
| noticed?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| It's safe if you ain't a pedo or terrorist.
|
| Sometimes I wonder wtf y'all are doing with such crazy security
| expectations and paranoia.
| mass_and_energy wrote:
| The implication of the right to privacy being unnecessary
| because you have nothing to hide is akin to declaring the right
| to free speech unnecessary because you have nothing to say.
|
| The ability to maintain privacy and anonymity is not for today,
| it's for tomorrow.
| ciiiicii wrote:
| I don't think many people seriously think that terrorists
| planning attacks to maim and kill people, and pedophiles
| sharing child sexual abuse imagery with each other, have an
| absolute right to privacy in such communications, nor that
| doing so is an example of free speech.
|
| Really it's a good thing that the "global adversary" is -
| almost certainly - keeping tabs on Tor traffic and tracking
| down who is responsible for the worst abuses within this
| network.
| nurumaik wrote:
| Not everyone lives in a country where government is a friend
| bornfreddy wrote:
| And even if it is today, a fiend is just one bad election
| away.
| o999 wrote:
| Noone does..
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| 1. It's fun. Playing with these technologies is entertaining
| and will learn you some good stuff about the networking and the
| encryption and what not.
|
| 2. Tor allows reception of unsolicited TCP/IPv4 traffic if you
| are behind a NAT you can't open ports for, because your
| connection to the network is initiated on your side. This is
| nice, especially with increasing prevalence of CGNAT.
|
| 3. Something my niece stated when I talked to her about it, who
| I disagree with: Many countries have a notion of upstanding
| citizen enforced by well funded and maintained violence-
| monopoly actors (R) that are not equivalent to what the
| majority of citizens actually do (S). R minus S is T - the
| tolerance gap. Things that allow T to exist include lack of
| will to prosecute, general social acceptance of things that
| were not acceptable years ago, etc. All things that are quite
| mutable. If your activities fall into T, privacy-enforcement
| tech benefits you if R and S might change in the future.
|
| FWIW I am firmly in the "if you have nothing to hide you have
| nothing to fear" camp and I looked at her funny when she said
| this. Maybe she is a criminal or just crazy, idk.
| ObsidianBreaks wrote:
| I think it's prudent to point out that the article's title is
| quite 'clickbaity', but to address it directly, the correct
| answer is (as it usually is) is 'it depends'. In my view, it
| depends on the answer to the question 'safe for who?', i.e. what
| is the threat model to which you are trying to guard against? If
| it's the US, then of course not, as the code is well-known to the
| US and I would expect that they have known vulnerabilities that
| they can leverage to ascertain the users of their service. The
| fact that TOR is, 'on paper', non-governmental doesn't really
| matter these days with the merging of private and public (and
| non-affiliated open-source communities) inside the security
| community. I would say that even the fact that it's open source
| isn't much of guard against such attacks, given that it relies on
| proficient oversight (which many eyes may not guarantee). Against
| other 'nation state' type adversaries - I'd wager that the more
| prominent who have the capacity to host a large number of relay
| nodes, and have access to very large computational power, will
| find it possible to decode portions of the TOR traffic. Against
| less technically proficient adversaries, such as 'run of the
| mill' police forces and minor nation states I'd go so far as to
| say it _might_ be secure but only if you are using it for
| something uninteresting to them, but I ask 'how hard is it
| really to do a man in the middle a TOR relay?', and in terms of
| the most general case, 'what about the endpoints?' which of
| course aren't secured via TOR. Ultimately the best defense
| against 'snooping' in my view is to use a pre-agreed
| communication protocol which is undocumented and is known only
| between the communicators and is unusual enough to be hard to
| recognize or hard to work out what it means (preferably with a
| key to those communications known only to the two parties), but
| then I suppose you could use any communication protocol...
| oytis wrote:
| Don't quite get it - why doesn't CCC share information with the
| Tor Project maintainers?
| solarpunk wrote:
| curious about this as well
| some_random wrote:
| I suspect that the reporter has a bone to pick with Tor and the
| CCC members that were given the documents were compelled
| legally or socially to not share them further.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Maybe they want to reveal it on the CCC in december?
| DonnyV wrote:
| Tor has never been safe to use.
| o999 wrote:
| Old Ricochet used onion v2, that has stopped working long ago as
| far as I know, or I am missing something
| basedrum wrote:
| You are right. The lack of details or time window when this
| happened make it difficult to know what the actual compromise
| was, or if it is still something that can be used. However, if
| they compromised a Ricochet user, then this attack was a long
| time ago, and from what Tor's blog says that client didn't have
| the defenses that would have prevented the attack they think it
| is. Without the actual details, it seems like this attack was
| mitigated some time ago and is no longer something that can be
| done in the same way.
| sathackr wrote:
| based on the article I think this is old news just now being
| reported
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| AFAIK v2 has stopped working. Iirc were up to v3 or something.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Was it ever safe? Wasnt it created by the AirForce or something?
| I've always thought of it as a honeypot.
| knodi123 wrote:
| > Wasnt it created by the AirForce or something?
|
| No, don't be silly, that's ridiculous! It was the Navy.
| archsurface wrote:
| The more privacy the better as far as I'm concerned, but I've
| never used tor. What are people using tor for? General comms,
| piracy (mild illegal), other (very illegal), ...?
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _other (very illegal), ...?_
|
| I will be waiting patiently for people to admit that they do
| very illegal things over Tor.
| knodi123 wrote:
| It's okay, you can safely confess to felonies and crimes
| against humanity on HN. Our usernames are meaningless and our
| traffic is SSL encrypted!
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I am interested in the "legitimate" uses for tor. I have not kept
| up with this but I understand it was designed by US Navy to make
| it hard for oppressive regiemes to track their citizens use of
| web.
|
| What do we want Tor for except as a hope that Russian citizens
| might be able to get to the BBC site?
|
| I am asking honestly - and would prefer not to be told my own
| government is on the verge of a mass pogrum so we had better take
| precautions.
| tonymet wrote:
| Anonymous publishing
| whimsicalism wrote:
| most governments retaliate to some degree against journalists,
| whistleblowers, etc. - no pogrom needed
| knodi123 wrote:
| For the same reason we have SSL on this site, despite the fact
| that it has no sex, no storefront, nor any access to my banking
| or private information.
|
| If everything is SSL secured, then we don't have to explain why
| any specific thing is SSL secured. The same reason can be
| applied to use of TOR.
| fragmede wrote:
| The point ranking on comments, which is private, would be of
| interest to parties training an LLM and want the data
| annotated, but your point stands.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I'm not sure how much more useful that is than just using
| HN's automatic ranking for comments, at least outside of
| parent comments on posts; As far as I can tell, child
| comments are always ORDER BY score DESC.
|
| Even for top level comments, HN's algorithm for ranking is
| pretty useful for assigning "worth"
| fragmede wrote:
| On posts there's an attempt to suface later comments
| (with fewer points) so the comment section isn't
| dominated by earlier posts.
|
| Ordering by score DESC only gives you relative point
| information, not absolute. Theres additional signal if
| the top comment has 100 points vs only having 3 (and the
| bottom post also having 100 vs 1).
| 0xggus wrote:
| >This is a collection of anonymous user stories from people who
| rely on Tor to protect their privacy and anonymity. We
| encourage you to share their experiences with your network,
| friends and family, or as part of your work to promote the use
| of privacy-preserving technologies like ours and help us defend
| strong online protections.
|
| https://community.torproject.org/outreach/stories/
| smoe wrote:
| Don't know if it is still used much. There is SecureDrop to
| facilitate communication between investigative journalists and
| sources/whistleblowsers via Tor that was at some point deployed
| by several prominent news organizations.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SecureDrop
| moogly wrote:
| Representing the letters "nsa" in "unsafe" since 2006.
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| Remember the Harvard student that emailed in a bomb threat via
| Tor to get out of a final exam in 2013?
|
| He got caught not by the FBI breaking Tor, but just by network
| analysis of university network traffic logs showing a very narrow
| list of on-campus people using Tor at the time the threat was
| communicated. He quickly confessed when interviewed.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/files/2013/1...
|
| Just another factor to consider when using Tor - who's network
| you're on.
| ocean_moist wrote:
| If your threat model includes western nation states, there are
| much bigger threats to your opsec than Tor. If your threat model
| does not include western nation states, Tor is safe to use.
| smm11 wrote:
| Still?
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| From what little I've heard, de-anonymization of Tor users is
| largely done by targeting their devices with zero-day exploits.
| That is still a valid method, I wouldn't trust Tor personally,
| but I'm with the Tor project that there is no credible evidence
| of a large scale de-anonymization attack.
| tomcam wrote:
| Sincere question. This was created with US government funding. Is
| there any reason to believe it is safe?
| hnisoss wrote:
| Even if you had your own SMT how can you be sure no one fiddled
| with your lab? If you can't trust your own stack 100% how can
| you trust ANYTHING else then?
|
| So my answer to your sincere question: no reason to believe it
| is safe, no.
| ementally wrote:
| https://spec.torproject.org/vanguards-spec/index.html
|
| >A guard discovery attack allows attackers to determine the guard
| relay of a Tor client. The hidden service protocol provides an
| attack vector for a guard discovery attack since anyone can force
| an HS to construct a 3-hop circuit to a relay, and repeat this
| process until one of the adversary's middle relays eventually
| ends up chosen in a circuit. These attacks are also possible to
| perform against clients, by causing an application to make
| repeated connections to multiple unique onion services.
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