[HN Gopher] Ricochet: Peer-to-peer instant messaging system buil...
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Ricochet: Peer-to-peer instant messaging system built on Tor hidden
services (2017)
Author : philonoist
Score : 84 points
Date : 2025-02-14 08:34 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| aleksjess wrote:
| Looks like a good idea... sadly the latest release is from 8y
| ago. :(
| emayljames wrote:
| And their website is down
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I guess something like Cwtch would be an actively maintained
| equivalent. https://docs.cwtch.im/
| derbOac wrote:
| Briar also can use Tor, among other things.
| johnisgood wrote:
| https://github.com/blueprint-freespeech/ricochet-refresh
|
| This is the forked and maintained Ricochet.
| 0557923525 wrote:
| 0557923525
| 0557923525 wrote:
| 0557923525 ..At nyd 200000 $$
| karel-3d wrote:
| > From 2019 to 2021, Ricochet was used by the admins (as well as
| an undercover investigator) of the child porn onion site
| Boystown. To identify the perpetrators, German police used a
| correlation analysis attack. By sending Ricochet messages to
| perpetrators and monitoring several hundred Tor nodes for
| simultaneous traffic of the correct size, authorities were able
| to identify intermediate Tor nodes and then also the
| perpetrator's entry nodes, revealing the perpetrators' IP
| addresses.
|
| From wikipedia.
| karel-3d wrote:
| From the cited article
|
| >It is still unclear from where, but the investigators
| apparently knew that the suspect was using O2 as his internet
| provider. They therefore chose a different approach: based on
| the correlation analysis of the middle node, they had already
| found out the IP address of the entry guard - and could hope
| that the suspect would continue to use it in the coming days
| and weeks. So the next time the suspect was online in Ricochet,
| all they had to do was ask Teleofnica for the addresses of all
| the O2 customers who were currently connected to this very
| Entry Guard. The result should have been a fairly short list.
|
| https://www.heise.de/en/news/Boystown-investigations-Catchin...
| johnisgood wrote:
| https://github.com/blueprint-freespeech/ricochet-refresh/iss...
|
| Is it not related?
| morganava wrote:
| Hi, morganava here. I'm currently the maintainer of Ricochet-
| Refresh (https://github.com/blueprint-freespeech/ricochet-
| refresh) which is the maintained fork of Ricochet-IM (which
| no longer works since like 2021 due to v2 onion-service
| deprecation in the tor network itself).
|
| First the good(?) news in bulleted list format:
|
| - As far as we know these efforts took place before the
| vanguards-lite feature became standard in tor which makes
| guard discovery of onion-services harder
|
| - The de-anonyimsation efforts took many months if not years
| and was a targeted effort (i.e. they did not have a turn-key
| de-anonymise onion-services solution)
|
| - it was only possible because the Germans knew the target's
| id/onion-service; if the target had kept their id secret then
| the Germans wouldn't have been able to de-anonymise it.
|
| - we've been working on a solution to the cyber-stalking
| problem for a few years since it was first discovered; you
| can find out all about that here:
| https://gosling.technology/design-doc.xhtml
|
| - work has started on the next major version of Ricochet-
| Refresh which will include these improvements, so look
| forward to that in the coming years
|
| ---
|
| The linked bug is related but it's not _exactly_ the attack
| vector believed to be used in the boystown incident.
| Specifically (according to this artikel linked from
| wikipedia: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Boystown-
| investigations-Catchin...), the German police seem to been
| able to send arbitrary messages to the target which would
| imply they had compromised one of the target's contacts or
| the target had accepted a friend request from the police. So
| in some sense, the Germans had an easier time at it than we
| hypothesized since they didn't need to rely solely on
| metadata of online/offline status to find the user's guard.
| Instead they basically got lucky and were able to fingerprint
| their own network traffic to the user through relays they
| happened to control (unknown if they ran their own custom
| relays or tapped existing).
|
| Sorry it's a bit of hand-wavey here as the reporter refused
| to give us source documents so we don't actually know
| precisely how this attack worked and have had to piece things
| together based on their claims and the state of tor, the tor
| network, and ricochet-im back then. We've had to basically
| rely on the word of reporters that they're understanding
| their material correctly and that they've communicated it
| correctly (so like a second-hand retelling of a bug report
| XD). We do know it took the Germans quite a while (i.e.
| months to years) to do this and had to start over a few times
| when the target's guard node rotated.
|
| The fundamental problem which makes this sort of attack
| possible is that onion-service based peer-to-peer
| communications necessarily require an always-on onion-service
| for your peers to connect to. Without this piece nothing
| works. To work around this problem, we've been working on
| Gosling ( https://github.com/blueprint-freespeech/gosling )
| which at a high level, allows you to have the p2p properties
| without the always on possibly _public_ onion-service by
| basically negotiating credentials for 'secret' onion-
| services known only to your authorised peers (i.e. you
| contacts). Once you've added all your peers/friends that you
| want, you can shut down the public onion-service without
| interrupting normal communications with your peers. This of
| course does imply that you need to trust you contacts aren't
| cops.
|
| For the specifics, please go read our spec:
| https://gosling.technology/gosling-spec.xhtml
|
| Anyways, happy to answer any further questions on this.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Does Ricochet Refresh use Gosling right now?
|
| Thank you a lot for the write up!
|
| > This of course does imply that you need to trust you
| contacts aren't cops.
|
| What happens if you find it out after the fact? Just
| regenerate everything and re-add friends? How much would it
| compromise though to have a friend that turns out to be a
| cop?
| morganava wrote:
| > Does Ricochet Refresh use Gosling right now?
|
| It does not, but work is happening in a (currently local)
| alpha branch on this. Unfortunately it is not a _simple_
| task and is more akin to a complete re-write in scope.
|
| > What happens if you find it out after the fact? Just
| regenerate everything and re-add friends?
|
| Currently your only recourse is to stop using your
| compromised id, create a new one, and re-add all your
| trusted contacts.
|
| > How much would it compromise though to have a friend
| that turns out to be a cop?
|
| It depends. Are you the kind of target with actual
| intelligence agencies interested in unmasking you?
|
| We presume that similar finger-printing attacks are still
| possible but harder than they were in 2020 due to
| upstream changes in tor and the tor network. However, in
| principle cyber-stalking and the power to somehow own
| (i.e. run your own, hack, tap, subpoena, etc) guard nodes
| (and luck so that your target goes through these guard
| nodes) are all you need to do guard discovery. And once
| one knows the target's guard, you 'just' need to figure
| out who the guard is talking to and from there the target
| can be de-anonyimised.
|
| If you find out one of your contacts is malicious and you
| cut off their access then you're 'fine' going forward
| presuming they didn't already compromise you. They would
| essentially have to completely start over (i.e. discover
| your new identity, get you to add them as a friend, wait
| for you to go through a friendly guard node, etc).
|
| --
|
| One thing that is important to bring in perspective here
| is that it is not _easy_ to do this and it does take
| significant resources /attention to do. It takes luck,
| time, and particular positioning in/around the tor
| network (e.g. running malicious relays, dragnet
| surveillance, etc). The lesson to take here isn't 'oh
| shit ricochet/tor/whatever is broken use something else
| instead'.
|
| These types of events get a lot of media attention and
| focus on the failures without anyone pointing out 'hey
| yeah everything else is non-anonymous by default'. If the
| target had been using AIM or something this wouldn't show
| up on anyone's radar because of course that shit is
| broken (how many times now has leakers of military
| secrets on Discord been identified and prosecuted?).
|
| For the majority of users that don't have a line item in
| the NSA's budget dedicated to hunting them down,
| Ricochet-Refresh and tor in general are fine and will
| keep you anonymous (presuming you don't dox yourself XD).
| And, even if the feds are out to get you, you're still
| 'fine' using Ricochet-Refresh (based on what we know) so
| long as you keep your onion-service id secret and shared
| with only trusted people.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| _You should support The Tor Project, EFF, and run a Tor relay._
|
| More people might run a Tor relay if there was a way to do so
| without compromising their privacy.
| fsflover wrote:
| How does running a Tor relay compromise your privacy?
| harshreality wrote:
| TLAs will be far more likely to do traffic analysis on your
| connection.
| marc_abonce wrote:
| I assume that they mean that the identity of the people
| running the Tor relays can be known. For example, if you run
| a relay from your own physical server, then your ISP knows
| who pays for that static IP. If you run it from a VPS or
| cloud, the company knows who's paying for that server.
|
| But if you live in a liberal democracy, none of that should
| be an issue as far as I know, specially if you're running a
| non-exit node.
| k__ wrote:
| Half-OT:
|
| How well do Onion services work with regular HTTP and DNS?
|
| Can I use Onion IDs use just like a regular domain?
| 3s wrote:
| The problem with all anonymous communication systems is that they
| suffer from network effects even more than traditional
| communication systems. By having few people use it you
| immediately expose yourself by being part of a small group of
| people using it, becoming an easy target. Unfortunately the
| reality is that it's often easier to hide as a needle in a
| haystack on something like WhatsApp than it is to use a
| theoretically anonymous communication system that lacks the
| "haystack" altogether
| 0557923525 wrote:
| 0557923525
| 0557923525 wrote:
| ...xhskhx
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(page generated 2025-02-14 23:01 UTC)