[HN Gopher] Tor: How a military project became a lifeline for pr...
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Tor: How a military project became a lifeline for privacy
Author : anarbadalov
Score : 188 points
Date : 2025-08-08 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| zwnow wrote:
| Isn't Tor dead? Wasn't it infiltrated long ago?
| 8organicbits wrote:
| What makes you believe that?
| zwnow wrote:
| Read some story about some authority having set up tons of
| servers within the tor network to bust some criminal activity
| effectively making it not anonymous anymore. Was a while back
| on HN
| thewebguyd wrote:
| The feds and other equivalent agencies in other countries
| have been running exit nodes for years, but its still
| better than most solutions even if not perfect. Anyone who
| has gotten caught though likely wasn't because of any flaws
| in Tor (or said exit nodes) but because of other lapses in
| OpSec.
|
| That being said, yes, feds can de-anonymize traffic,
| probably reliably at this point. There are only about
| 7-8000 active nodes, most in data centers. The less nodes
| you hop through, the more likely that traffic can be traced
| back to the entry point (guard node), and combined with
| timing can be reasonably traced back to the user. Tor works
| best with many, many nodes, and a minimum of three. There's
| not as many nodes as there needs to be so quite often it's
| only 3 you are going through (guard node/entry point,
| middle node, exit node)
|
| Plus browsing habits can also be revealing. Just because
| someone is using Tor doesn't mean they also have disabled
| javascript, blocked cookies, aren't logging into accounts,
| etc.
| bombcar wrote:
| > Anyone who has gotten caught though likely wasn't
| because of any flaws in Tor (or said exit nodes) but
| because of other lapses in OpSec.
|
| There have been some cases where some consider the "other
| lapses in OpSec" to be parallel construction to disguise
| a Tor vulnerability/breach, and others where the
| government has declined to prosecute because they'd have
| to reveal how they know.
|
| If Tor were compromised, we'd likely not know. It's
| highly likely that it's fine for "normal people" things.
| ls612 wrote:
| At least back in the Snowden days it was very unreliable
| for the US to deanonymize Tor traffic based on those
| documents.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| That was over a decade ago. They've almost certainly
| progressed since.
|
| ... now my back hurts and I want the damn kids off my
| lawn.
| ls612 wrote:
| I mean if anything it's harder today in many ways for the
| government than it was during the Snowden days, because
| that prompted tech people to take internet security
| seriously. Look at the cost trends for 0days over the
| past ten years.
| openasocket wrote:
| Does controlling exit nodes necessarily help with
| deanonimizing? You would need control of the internal
| nodes for classic de-anonymization, or monitoring of both
| the exit nodes and the originating network for timing
| attacks. Also, exit nodes aren't involved in hidden
| services. That 7-8000 figure you quoted: is that just
| exit nodes, or all nodes? My understanding was there
| aren't a ton of exit nodes because anyone operating an
| exit node is liable to get harassed by people impacted by
| any malicious traffic originating from Tor. But that
| isn't really an issue for internal nodes, and so there
| are more of them
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Controlling an exit node alone doesn't help, but
| controlling both entry and exit nodes does.
|
| The tor project has network stats on their website:
| https://metrics.torproject.org/networksize.html
|
| Looks like about 8,000 relays, inclusive of entry and
| exit nodes. Looks like about 2,500 exit nodes, and ~5,000
| guard nodes. With that few I'd say it's reasonable to
| assume that a large number of both entry and exit are
| controlled by government agencies, at least enough to
| reliable to conduct timing attacks against a specific
| target they are interested in.
| gausswho wrote:
| Am also interested in the current understanding of
| culpability in the US for operating an exit node.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > Am also interested in the current understanding of
| culpability in the US for operating an exit node.
|
| It's a little ambiguous.
|
| Section 230 (which continues to be under attack) provides
| some legal immunity, along with the DMCA is a safe harbor
| against copyright infringement claims for the Tor relay
| operator. Running a middle relay is generally fine and
| safe.
|
| But, running an exit relay is risky. Even if you can't be
| held legally liable for the traffic coming from the exit,
| you could still get raided, and it has happened before
| where exit node operators have been raided after the
| traffic coming out of it was attributed to the node
| owner.
|
| That being said, it's legal to run an exit node (for
| now). The problem is more so dealing with the inevitable
| law enforcement subpoenas or seizures, and having the
| money and resources to prove you are innocent.
| costco wrote:
| This page on the mailing list has links to cases of
| people who were caught because of an unknown flaw in Tor:
| https://archive.torproject.org/websites/lists.torproject.
| org...
|
| I can't find a link, but I think people have done
| simulations and the privacy benefits of more hops are not
| as great as one might think. If you control the guard and
| exit, then traffic confirmation is relatively easy by
| just looking at timing and volume of traffic no matter
| how many hops are in between.
| 8kingDreux8 wrote:
| I believe this is the thread you're talking about
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41584428
| 8organicbits wrote:
| The article talks about a user who was using very old
| software, which seems like a pretty straightforward
| mistake. There's a bunch of speculation in the comments
| about other things, but I don't really see sources cited,
| so it's hard to tell what informs those opinions.
| chews wrote:
| It was always that way, Ross Ulbrect was connected to his
| dark website by tracing via exit nodes.
|
| Tor was always a government tool.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > Ross Ulbrect was connected to his dark website by
| tracing via exit nodes
|
| Ulbricht wasn't caught because of flaws in Tor, but he
| made other mistakes. He posted stuff on LinkedIn alluding
| to his activities, he used a real photo on his fake IDs
| to rent servers, he used his real name, posting a
| question on stack over flow about running a Tor service,
| he posted his personal gmail, looked for couriers on
| Google+, and lastly paid an undercover cop for a hit.
|
| As for getting his location, once the feds gained acccess
| to silk road, they matched up activity logs, his posting
| habits were consistent with being in the pacific time
| zone, and they matched up his user name between his posts
| on silk road as altoid and he reused the same screenname,
| associated with his gmail address and full name, on other
| websites.
|
| A series of stupid opsec mistakes got him caught, not
| Tor.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| All of this should serve as a reminder that if .gov
| _really, really_ wants you, they 've got you.
|
| Unless, of course, they want everybody, which even they
| don't have the resources to handle.
| mburns wrote:
| It should (also) serve as a reminder that OpSec is
| important.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Maybe a reminder to also not sell heavy drugs to children
| or to order murder for hire?
| cluckindan wrote:
| When did he sell heavy drugs to children?
|
| When did he sell drugs?
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Leaving out 'When did he pay to have someone killed' from
| your question is disingenuous, because he directly did
| that.
|
| He facilitated drug sales. If you setup 'clucks brick and
| mortar Silk Road' you'd be just as guilty.
|
| I don't think that was ever rosses ethical objective
| though, I'm pretty sure he felt that drugs should be less
| illegal and safe. I'm under the impression that Silk Road
| has rules on what could be sold, and that post SR markets
| do allow those things, but I could be wrong.
| Ray20 wrote:
| The observable world around us.
|
| In a world where Tor is not a honeypot of some three letter
| agency, there are implementations of projects like Jim Bell's
| Assassination Politics. In a world where Tor is not a
| honeypot its use would be banned, much like the use of
| Tornado Cash was banned and shut down until the secret
| services took control of it.
|
| And we obviously don't live in such world.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| > its use would be banned
|
| There are many places in the world where direct access to
| Tor is blocked. There are many countries where use of a VPN
| is illegal, VPNs are required to log by law, etc. I
| disagree with this premise.
| trod1234 wrote:
| Those countries seek destructive control of all within
| its sphere of influence.
|
| There are generally two types of countries, those that
| seek agency, independence, and freedom of rational
| thought and action; which requires privacy, and there are
| those that seek ultimate control, imposing dependence,
| coercion and corruption of reason; from the top down.
|
| The cultures that seek total control generally fall under
| totalism and are parasitic in nature. The ones that seek
| agency, freedom, and independence, Protean.
| nickslaughter02 wrote:
| EU countries will soon join the club.
|
| "VPN services may soon become a new target of EU
| lawmakers after being deemed a "key challenge""
| https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-
| servi...
| kelipso wrote:
| Probably because those governments don't control the
| honeypot.
| bevr1337 wrote:
| It's been assumed that three-letter agencies operate many exit
| nodes for a hot minute. I don't know if this is a special case
| of infiltration because it's TOR SOP.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This isnt necessarily malicious. As the OP states TOR only
| works if a lot of people use it for regular browsing. The
| government wants it to work for the covert stuff so they need
| buy in from regulars and improving the service is how to do
| that.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| I personally can't see how it can be secure without dummy
| messages.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Its not a binary thing, Tor updates all the time
|
| Many comments talk about exit nodes for surveillance, but there
| is a totally different vector of use and considerations that
| dint apply when you aren't trying to access clearnet
|
| And even on darknet it depends on what you're doing
|
| Reading the NY Times' darknet site or forum or even nuet
| browsing darknet markerplace from Tor Browser, whereas I would
| use a Tor OS like Tails or dual gated VM like Whonix for doing
| something illicit
| markasoftware wrote:
| It depends on your threat model. Tor is focused on hiding from
| small-scale passive adversaries (eg, you're in Iran and don't
| want the Iranian government to see what you're doing. Or your
| ISP. Or any single node operator). Even the original Tor paper
| makes it clear that Tor isn't secure against a "global passive
| adversary" that can observe a large portion of global internet
| traffic, like the five eyes likely can today.
|
| If you want to avoid global passive adversaries, a mixnet like
| Nym can work. I'm also working on a related project which takes
| a different approach of building your own circuit of proxy
| servers manually with lots of traffic padding:
| https://github.com/markasoftware/i405-tunnel
| zwnow wrote:
| I just use it to get books for free so idk about all the
| state regulation stuff.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I've never felt like I knew how to use Tor correctly, or trusted
| anyone to be able to guide me on that.
| sherr wrote:
| I sympathise with a bit of paranoia about this. Personally, I'd
| use a platform like "Tails" (do your own research) which wraps
| Tor up in a USB bootable Linux OS.
|
| https://tails.net/
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Back when I tried, it was a modified Firefox build.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| That's just a browser form of it:
| https://www.torproject.org/download/
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Simply download the Tor Browser [1], which is simply a hardened
| version of Firefox that connects to the Tor network.
|
| Don't install addons in this browser. Don't resize the browser
| window. All tor browsers instances have the same default window
| size, which prevents websites from tracking you. Obviously
| don't login into websites with your regular email or provide
| websites with your PII.
|
| If you are in a country or on a network that blocks the basic
| Tor network, the FAQ explains how to get around this by using
| Tor bridges or other techniques [2].
|
| That's pretty much all you need to know.
|
| [1] https://www.torproject.org/download/
|
| [2] https://support.torproject.org/censorship/
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > All tor browsers instances have the same default window
| size, which prevents websites from tracking you.
|
| Wouldn't that in and of itself be a possible clue that
| someone was using Tor?
| keysdev wrote:
| Or a computer of that window size, and there a lot browsers
| that dont support js.
| qualeed wrote:
| Figuring out someone is using Tor is trivial (e.g. list of
| exit node IPs https://www.dan.me.uk/torlist/?exit).
|
| This mitigation helps protect the _individual_ Tor user
| (e.g. with a unique 1726x907 px window) being fingerprinted
| across multiple sessions / sites.
| trod1234 wrote:
| They removed OS spoofing just recently, and there isn't a
| mitigation for Raptor, some think meek might help with
| Raptor, but its very much up in the air.
| qualeed wrote:
| There is partial mitigation for RAPTOR: Counter-RAPTOR
| from 2017 (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp
| =&arnumber=795...) with mostly the same authors.
|
| I haven't kept up with the space much since then, so am
| unaware if there is more recent work.
|
| In any case, there are valid threat models where you want
| to mitigate website fingerprinting but aren't necessarily
| concerned with AS-level adversaries.
| trod1234 wrote:
| I've seen that, but I didn't see much of a mitigation,
| though I'll go back and recheck just to be sure, I was
| pressed for time last time I look at that.
|
| In fairness, most of big tech are AS-level adversaries at
| this point.
|
| Active attack through BGP-hijacking may be partially
| mitigated, but this isn't really needed for the most
| pernicious attacks which are interception/injection from
| a regional entity that's routing to the broader internet
| (outbound connections).
|
| The same entities can do early transparent encryption
| termination for outbound connections (to the general web)
| since they have their own private signing keys tied to
| root trust CAs (just not the one the valid cert was
| issued to), and that lets them collect a treasure trove
| of forensic artifacts to improve their citizen dossier
| for advertisers/highest-bidder, or inject content that is
| ephemeral in nature.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| While not perfect, I thought tor rounded reported
| resolution to a small set of values
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| You are correct. I was going off my memory. They say [1]
|
| > To prevent fingerprinting based on screen dimensions,
| Tor Browser starts with a content window rounded to a
| multiple of 200px x 100px. The strategy here is to put
| all users in a couple of buckets to make it harder to
| single them out.
|
| Moreover, even if you resize your window, the browser
| tries to protect you
|
| > by adding margins to a browser window so that the
| window is as close as possible to the desired size while
| users are still in a couple of screen size buckets that
| prevent singling them out with the help of screen
| dimensions.
|
| [1] https://tb-manual.torproject.org/anti-
| fingerprinting/#letter...
| bauruine wrote:
| The list of Tor nodes is public so it's trivial to detect a
| user is using Tor you just have to check the IP.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _That 's pretty much all you need to know._
|
| Depends on the level of anonymity the end-user desires. That
| rabbit hole is deep, but not _that_ deep:
| https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/advanced-privacy-and-
| ano... / https://archive.today/9DhtT (by u/mirmir)
| qualeed wrote:
| For a guide that goes into so much detail (as far as
| suggesting enterprise-grade drives, recommended RAID
| configurations, etc.), not even a passing mention of Tails
| or Qubes-Whonix is a really interesting choice (read:
| discouraging omission)!
| sorenjan wrote:
| Is window size visible to web sites when java script is
| turned off? It's off by default in Tor browser.
| qualeed wrote:
| It's _on_ by default in Tor browser.
|
| You have to explicitly switch to "Safest" mode to turn it
| off completely.
|
| > _Why does Tor Browser ship with JavaScript enabled?
|
| We configure NoScript to allow JavaScript by default in Tor
| Browser because many websites will not work with JavaScript
| disabled. Most users would give up on Tor entirely if we
| disabled JavaScript by default because it would cause so
| many problems for them. Ultimately, we want to make Tor
| Browser as secure as possible while also making it usable
| for the majority of people, so for now, that means leaving
| JavaScript enabled by default._
|
| https://support.torproject.org/tbb/tbb-34/
| minitech wrote:
| Yes, CSS and <picture> etc. can load different resources
| based on viewport size. Then there are side channels like
| lazy loading, layout + what you interact with.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Also don't use non-HTTPS websites while using Tor, and avoid
| downloading things on hidden services. Using a clearnet
| website's hidden service is better than the https version if
| available (duckduckgo and reddit offer both, for example),
| too, although only marginally so
| qualeed wrote:
| There's a ton of little things like this (e.g. you also
| should consider not using bookmarks, or at least avoiding
| obscure ones).
|
| A good overview is available at https://www.whonix.org/wiki
| /Tor_Browser#Unsafe_Tor_Browser_H...
| jandrese wrote:
| The generally recommended way is to download Tails to a USB
| thumb drive and boot off of that. This is safer than just using
| the TOR browser and if something does attack your system none
| of your actual data is on the OS.
|
| https://tails.net/
| apopapo wrote:
| Tor is nice, but I still prefer i2p.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| It's all about trust
| keysdev wrote:
| But it is more difficult to run
| ricardo81 wrote:
| I'd never used Tor, though had to scrape a bunch of things that
| required different IPs. I figured their endpoints were already
| tarred.
|
| With the porn block in the UK though, the "New Private Window
| with Tor" in Brave is very convenient.
|
| Maybe not for long, or maybe not. I guess websites don't need to
| comply beyond a certain point.
|
| There are tons of "residential proxy" and whatnot type services
| available, IP being a source of truth doesn't seem to matter much
| in 2025. The Perplexity 'bot' recent topic being an example of
| that.
|
| Basically if you want to access any resource on the web for a
| dollar a GB or so you can use millions of IPs.
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed, I've investigated some cyber attacks recently that came
| from residential IPs in California and NY, though investigation
| turned up the real origins as coming from India. It's pretty
| easy to pull off nowadays
| deadbabe wrote:
| Any tutorial?
| mzajc wrote:
| Residential proxies usually piggy back off unsuspecting
| users, either through hacked routers/IoT, malicious browser
| extensions, malicious smartphone applications, or any other
| kind of malware. If you're looking for a tutorial on how to
| infect and exploit users, you're not on the right site.
|
| As an illustration of how bad things are on _just_ the
| browser extension front: https://sponsor.ajay.app/emails/
| trod1234 wrote:
| The problem with most infrastructure is that there's a big gap
| in security where it centralizes, and its transparent.
|
| To understand how, you should review the Princeton Report's
| Raptor attack, and understand how it works (2015).
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >With the porn block in the UK though, the "New Private Window
| with Tor" in Brave is very convenient.
|
| Has someone interested in seeing privacy secured into the
| future, I've been happy that governments are accelerating their
| censorship for this reason.
| taminka wrote:
| i wish they were also a lifeline for censorship too, tor is
| effectively non functional in many countries :(
| markasoftware wrote:
| tor tries very hard to bypass censorship. Have you tried the
| numerous Tor bridges, or the new Snowflake p2p bridge?
| taminka wrote:
| yeah none of them work in russia, only thing that works is
| xray vpn
| jmclnx wrote:
| I ran a bridge until recently, but the server died a heat death
| after I moved to another apartment :(
|
| I have not yet had time to find a suitable replacement machine.
| But running a bridge is a cheap, safe low network volume method
| people can help out from home. I had it going to help people in
| 'bad' countries to get out to the rest of the world.
|
| https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/bridge/
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I ran a bridge until recently
|
| A lifetime ago, I ran bridges from RAM only distros. But early
| versions of the Dan list (1st in wide use) killed that.
|
| DL didn't try hard to differentiate between bridge IPs and exit
| IPs. Server hosts just grabbed the first list they saw and
| blocked with it.
|
| It was years before the notion of Exit != Bridge became
| understood but everyone had moved on. We're at the entropic 'No
| One Cares Anymore' phase now.
| costco wrote:
| Were you running specifically a bridge or just a non exit
| relay? Bridges are generally unlisted and are somewhat
| expensive to mass scrape (the bridge distributors will
| require captcha or email or Telegram etc) so they are less
| likely to show up in those lists. Whereas all relays are
| listed in the consensus and can be trivially enumerated.
| neilv wrote:
| I used Tor for surveillance. But an appropriate kind, IMHO.
|
| I used Tor as a small part of one of the capabilities of a supply
| chain integrity startup. I built a fancy scraper/crawler to
| discreetly monitor a major international marketplace (mainstream,
| not darknet), including selecting appropriate Tor exit nodes for
| each regional site, to try to ensure that we were seeing the same
| site content that people from those regions were seeing.
|
| Tor somehow worked perfectly for those needs. So my only big
| concern was making sure everyone in the startup knew not to go
| bragging about this unusually good data we had. Since we were one
| C&D letter away from not being able to get the data at all.
|
| (Unfortunately, this had to be a little adversarial with the
| marketplace, not done as a data-sharing partnership, since the
| marketplace benefited from a cut of all the counterfeit and
| graymarket sales that we were trying to fight. But I made sure
| the scraper was gentle yet effective, both to not be a jerk, and
| also to not attract attention.)
|
| (I can talk about it now, since the startup ran out of runway
| during Covid investor skittishness.)
| cedws wrote:
| What was the scraper gathering specifically?
| neilv wrote:
| Listings of items for sale (for ~100 brands), and how that
| changed over time. With the marketplace having a pretty rich
| schema to reconstruct from their server-side rendering.
|
| One of the purposes was cold sales outreaches to an exec at a
| brand, maybe something like, "Here's a report about
| graymarket/counterfeit of your brand online, using data you
| probably haven't seen before; we have a solution we'd like to
| tell you about".
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| If I could wager a guess, it sounds like the startup was in
| the business of scraping Amazon.
| neilv wrote:
| No. And when people share info on HN, I don't like to see
| speculation in the comments about things they obviously
| intentionally didn't say (assuming that they seem to be
| speaking in good faith). That person, and other people who
| see the dynamic, presumably are less likely to share in the
| future.
| keysdev wrote:
| Thank you for pointing that out. Really appreciate you
| sharing.
|
| To the parent, please do not try to lure info out of
| people it is just not cool online or in real life when
| people obviously are being generic for a reason.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| I feel there is a level of irony in you being bothered
| about people interacting with content you've shared in a
| way you don't like when said content is a story about you
| interacting with other's content in a way they've
| explicitly put up barriers to try and stop you from doing
| that.
| neilv wrote:
| Who said the site put up barriers?
|
| I think you have a valid general question (and you'll
| note I said "appropriate kind, IMHO" at the top of the
| original comment, acknowledging others might disagree
| that it was appropriate), but I'd like to contrast two
| distinct situations:
|
| * A collegial forum, where people might go to share
| information, sometimes with discretion about what can and
| can't be said (or just comfort levels).
|
| * A large corporation that was profiting off of illegal
| businesses (e.g., contract-violating, IP-violating,
| defrauding buyers, possibly fencing), and we wanted to
| gather evidence of that on behalf of some of the harmed
| parties, to try to stop it. And we did that in a
| technologically gentle, non-disruptive way. And (as I
| mentioned in the original comment) we had a conscious
| policy to immediately cease if we were ever told to.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Did you know if you violated any ToS with your software?
| If yes, why did you feel compelled to continue?
| neilv wrote:
| No.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Ok, with the phrasing used it looked much more sus than
| it is then :)
| vhcr wrote:
| You won't be able to scrape Amazon using Tor.
| RGamma wrote:
| > selecting appropriate Tor exit nodes for each regional site
|
| So, a proxy? Onion routing doesn't really play a role for this
| use case.
| neilv wrote:
| > _So, a proxy? Onion routing doesn 't really play a role for
| this use case._
|
| The onion routing obscured our identity from the "proxy" exit
| nodes.
|
| Separately, Tor was also a convenient way to get a lot of
| arbitrary country-specific "proxies", _without_ dealing with
| the sometimes sketchy businesses that are behind residential
| IP proxies.
|
| (Counterfeiting/graymarket operations can be organized crime.
| I'd rather just fire up Tor, and trust math a little, than to
| try to vet the legitimacy and intentions of a residential IP
| broker.)
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Why would you need to obscure your identity from the exit
| nodes?
| qualeed wrote:
| So that the exit node can't go to the site they were
| scraping and say "this is the person scraping your site".
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| But you'd have relays in between, there's no way an exit
| node would know who is scraping...
| qualeed wrote:
| Right, but the question was _" why would you need to
| obscure your identity from the exit nodes"_, in the
| context of why the person chose Tor vs. a simple proxy.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Ohh I see!
| wslh wrote:
| The Tor exit nodes are public.
| qualeed wrote:
| They were concerned about the exit node identifying them,
| not the site identifying that a Tor exit node is
| connecting.
| trod1234 wrote:
| Honestly what he describes sounds like Raptor (Princeton
| Report, 2015)
| neilv wrote:
| How is this related to Princeton's Raptor, other than
| having the keywords "Tor" and "surveillance"?
|
| https://www.princeton.edu/~pmittal/publications/raptor-
| USENI...
|
| (Strange coincidence: We also had different key tech with
| the codename of Raptor, but it had nothing to do with Tor
| nor Web scraping. It was for discreet smartphone-based
| field auditing of physical product, in global physical
| retail and other locations. The codename was the result of
| a great morale-boosting impromptu brainstorming session
| between engineering and marketing people ("can you help
| think of a cool codename for this..."), and the resulting
| name highly apt, at least for the movie velociraptors. I
| built it, and, until Covid disrupted our F500 customers and
| investors, I was looking forward to hiring engineers to do
| further work on something cool-sounding like "Raptor",
| rather than "internal-app" or whatever first came to mind
| when creating the Git repo. :)
| trod1234 wrote:
| The major attack of concern described in the paper is the
| transparent early terminated encryption attack, and root
| trust signing that fall under effectively the same
| centralized hands at the AS level.
|
| Where an AS level entity MITMs all outbound connections
| from a region in automated fashion for collection, before
| that traffic ever makes it to TOR or its destination.
|
| It works for TOR, TLS, pretty much any protocol out there
| where key exchange or trust occurs; so long as the
| protocol is known and has distinct classifiable
| characteristics allowing computation to automatically do
| this.
|
| There have been instances where public certs issued by a
| CA with the same domain names, but are issued from a root
| CA that is other than the legitimate site's root CA which
| are used for attacks. CT logs don't stop this either.
|
| There is a lot of ephemeral content, and private
| information that can be both collected, and injected on a
| targeted basis if one has access to such junctions which
| the industry (Telecom) has proven time and again that
| they can't secure following basic practice; largely
| because mandates to backwards compatibility at the
| regulatory level.
|
| Social credit, where invisible factors people don't
| control force those same people into poverty through
| targeted denial of service (communications for job
| hunting/social contacts), zersetzung, etc; that all would
| be a breeze to set up without any external indicator, or
| remedy using that attack.
|
| What the target sees vs what everyone else sees would be
| quite different, and of course there would be people that
| gaslight and torture on top of it all (as a natural
| psychological defense mechanism of denial).
|
| Compromised communications under such type of attacks are
| madness inducing.
| RobRivera wrote:
| HEH
|
| I'm letting my imagination fill in the color on the specifics
| here and I'm working up a little grin.
|
| A hat tip to you
| cakealert wrote:
| This is not a good way to do this. Tor exit nodes are public
| and may be marked for special behavior by the marketplace you
| are surveying. There is no reason to believe you are getting
| good information this way.
|
| The right way to do this would be through a VPN/tor +
| Residential proxy to hide your intentions from everyone
| involved.
| anarbadalov wrote:
| For anyone interested in this author's book on Tor, it's
| available for free download! https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-
| monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-D... (full disclosure: i work for MIT
| Press)
| bauruine wrote:
| You can also buy it if you want to support the autor.
| https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548182/tor/
| dannyobrien wrote:
| It's a really good book! I was on the very edges of this scene
| for a chunk of the time described, and I thought it managed to
| catch a lot of the complexities without picking one possible
| narrative over another.
|
| Plus I learned a lot -- it came out of some academic research
| that pursued a unique angle: finding and talking to the Tor
| exit node operators about their experiences, rather than just
| say the developers, the executives, or the funders.
| anarbadalov wrote:
| I'll share your kind words with the author!
| TMWNN wrote:
| Thanks for that. Is it available as epub? I would like to read
| it on Kindle.
| NoSalt wrote:
| Especially as the internet, itself, started as a military
| project. [DARPA]
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Tor: How a military project became a lifeline for privacy_
|
| Arpanet: How a military project gutted personal privacy,
| destabilized self esteem and strangled attention spans
| ezbie wrote:
| "A lifeline for privacy" reads more like a "hub for pedophilia
| and other gross, unspeakable crimes".
|
| Just use a VPN for fuck's sake.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| VPNs just shift trust from the service provider to the VPN
| provider, and I don't have much reason to do so for most of my
| uses. NordVPN or Surfshark are way scummier than a harmless
| blog or HN, for example, and have more financial and legal
| incentives to track me
| daft_pink wrote:
| I think they publicized it so they could obscurely use it for
| military purposes. The users are easy to spot if they are all
| military users. Get tons and tons of regular users to use it and
| you obscure who is trying to hide.
| esseph wrote:
| This is exactly it from what I have heard. I have heard this
| from a large number of trustworthy sources over the years.
| crmd wrote:
| I assume when I'm using Tor that every packet is the under the
| highest level of collection/analysis priority. I think maybe
| sometimes it's better to blend into in the crowd
| costco wrote:
| If you already have an understanding of how Tor works and want to
| know about attacks on it, read these!
|
| - https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/vanguards/blob/master/READM...
|
| - https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/vanguards/blob/master/READM...
|
| - https://spec.torproject.org/proposals/344-protocol-info-leak...
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