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Tor: A JAP Replacement
kid_wonder writes "Wired is running an article describing an answer to this previous /. story. Packets are sent through a network of randomly selected servers each of which knows only its predecessor and successor. Packets are unwrapped by a symmetric encryption key at each server that peels off one layer and reveals instructions for the next downstream node. As a 'connection-based low-latency anonymous communication system,' Tor seems to be the answer to JAP to allow anonymous networking activities of all kinds."
sigh...
We are REPLACING japs now??!?!?
Isn't this onion routing thing exactly what freenet uses?
Tor - The internet onion!
No, but seriously, the blurb says this is low latency, how that's the case, I fail to see. First client wants to send a HTTP GET or something similar via Tor, so every packet involved needs that info, plus a little bit extra to get it to the next node, plus a little bit more so the end node knows where it needs to be in the end on the return. So that's two extra little bits, then the stuff gets sent one node across which takes its info off and puts new info on.
Where is the low latency here? All this peeling/adding layers to peel off must be fairly time consuming. I'll admit I quite like the idea, and as soon as I click Submit I'm going to download and try it, but I fail to see how this can be faster than say, InvisibleIRC (IIP) was.
--
The last digit of pi is four.
our East Asian readers, will readily endorse this new standard...Honestly, I guess not many people think about their acronyms before they are released to the public.
Sig it.
Wow. Lots of DefCon related stories.
Anyway, for those asking, no, this isn't quite like Freenet. In TOR, you decide which points you want to send traffic through (and negotiate encryption keys with each one individually), and, unlike FreeNet, you can tunnel existing protocols over it (like, say http).
There's a lot of promise here, but in his talk, he was looking for sites that had at least 1Mbps up & down speeds for nodes. This isn't quite like Peekabooty, in that right now they're not looking for everyone to run a middleman node.
to help Internet users surf the Web anonymously and shield their online activities from corporate or government eyes. The system is based on a concept called onion routing.
I've just tried to set www.theonion.com:8800 as http proxy but it doesn't work...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
If the Navy is funding this project, don't you think they have already found a way of monitoring it?
Such systems right now have too high a latency and too much overhead (such as a peer sending "noise" into the network when not having the need to send any real data, just to deter packet analysis) that they aren't terribly practical... for now. So you most likely won't see the technology bundled in the next KaZaA, BitTorrent, etc., but we'll see what the future holds.
- sm
we did have this back in 1941
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
What happens when people start doing bad stuff with the tor system? You know it's going to happen...
The model is bad, because the people running the servers (like the old cypherpunk remailers) are supposed to provide services for free, out of the goodness of their hearts, and take the heat when people do malicious stuff with the network.
It seems to me that it's not a bad technical system, but that it fails when you start to think about the social and economic realities of the net.
(I know because I submitted this article too.)
1. The Navy is bankrolling the development, presumably to allow government employees to surf around without leaving ".gov" and ".mil" ip addresses in logs.
2. JAP supposedly has a German Government implanted backdoor that this one shouldn't because it's open source.
I think that the US Government is bankrolling it to piss off the Chinese.
This technology will certainly become a favored tool of terrorists trying to avoid the justice of the Bush administration.
Sincerely,
The MPAA.
I'm not sure yet what it does, but I'm thinking of calling it the Heuristic, Orthogonal, Non-Knuth-approved, Yielding algorithm.
HONKY, for short. I guess that name won't be a problem, will it? I mean, since JAP seems to be okay...
Onion routing does just that, it is a method for picking an anonymous route. Freenet is a distributed database.
In onion routing the client picks N nodes from the list of servers and encrypts using each servers public key. Then sends the data to the first server. In onion routing each packet of data contains the entire routing list, though it is encrypted in such a way that each node can only tell what the next node is.
Each Freenet nodes caches data blocks based on demand. When a request arrives looking for a data block Freenet forwards the request to a node that has similar information until the correct block is found. Each freenet node only knows about the next and previous nodes, and the route is determined by the key you are searching for.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I think it's great that the Navy is funding this. Now, where are the wire tap hooks? I always enjoy the way the government exempts itself from its own rules.
currently N=3 on tor...
Douglas Calvert
Something named "My own private Idaho", an anonymous remailing software from 1996-1998, did (and is still doing) exactly the same thing, with PGP integration, and server key publication.
From the couple of days I spent actually working in my highschool cisco class, I remember each router in a path is supposed to be able to optimize the route a packet is sent on by using local information and the packet's final destination. From what I gather from the limited technical details in the article, this protocol would require knowledge of the entire route at the initial node to handle the 'onion layer' encryption.
Is there some way of optimizing a path through a given number of nodes without keeping huge amounts of information about latency on every two nodes, or is this just bouncing the packet around for a while for anonymity and accepting the added latency, plus possibly the time it takes to detect and resend packets when one node in a path suddenly goes dead, making the custom-encrypted packet worthless?
This sounds a lot like an implementation of Mixmaster for TCP.
This sounds like a reinsertion of all the technology that has gone into anonymous mailers over the years (see MixMaster.) I hope that they aren't re-inventing everything and repeating the same mistakes. The existing technology should be mostly portable from the application layer to the session or layer.
I was at a presentation by the guy behind MixMaster and was impressed by all the thought that has gone into the various generations of the application. They even had it generating fake messages so you can't do traffic analysis.
> Why is this so tough for people to "get" ?
Maybe because you say right on your website, "Don't post this to slashdot. You will murder my cable modem."
Who knows how many truely brilliant ideas have languished in obscurity because their author was afraid of a slashdotting... Surely thousands -- no, millions...
No one can replace the Jewish American Princess, what with her snooty attitude and come-hither glances. Come on.. baby needs a new BMW
called KRAUT.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
It's important to note that there are some statistical attacks on both of these systems, and none of them are very secure for long communication sessions when group membership churns, as in a peer-to-peer network.
Hmmm...this raises a side question. Can Linux bind different stacks to different devices? For example: eth0 could be your standard stack with the regular firewall. eth1 could be an encrypted stack with routing over a P2P style net. eth2 could be...you get the point. Note that ethx doesn't actually have to be a physical device.
... The Register broke this story ages ago: Here and Here. Why is /. so reluctant to credit these guys for the tech stories they so often break?
Jealousy?
http://www.linux-mag.com/2000-04/gear_01.html
They that can give up essential latency to obtain a little temporary anonymity deserve neither latency nor anonymity.
I need my data at the speed of light, bitches!
It's been quite a while since I made my site LinuxReviews IPv6 Ready. This has made me look at the IPv6-ready Web Server list from time to time and sadly there is very few sites out there that are IPv6 capable.
It is nice to know Tor supports standard protocols like http://. But do you really believe those "Tor Ready!" websites will start popping up any time soon? I don't think so. The majority of todays websites do not validate, doesn't support IPv6 and many don't even render correctly in the majority of web browsers. Will Tor-Ready be prioritized higher by the average webmaster than these and other more serious issues?
I am also very skeptical to the bandwidth requirements and the latency. My Ipv6 connection gives me full bandwidth, but I do notice that connections going through the tunnel are, in fact, much more latent than normal native Ipv4 connections. So why would I prefer to visit some website using Tor when the real difference is a longer loading period? Yes, what the author says about low latency may be true. It may have less latency than alternatives, but do not try to tell me I won't notice significantly higher latency if I try to IRC through a TOR connection.
People are talking about Ipv6 becoming standard in 5-6 years, I will be amazed if tor still exists at that point in time and even more amazed if it's actually implemented on more than 0.0001% of the Internet's services.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
but does anyone really think that the ratio of illegal porn and illicitly-traded copyrighted material to legitimate use isn't astronomical?
That means little.
The same is true of P2P networks.
P2P file distribution is simply both cheap and an effective way of offloading distribution costs onto all consumers -- it is as elegant a concept as the free market.
Currently, much of the use of P2P file distribution happens to be for copyright-infringing content and porn. This is not because of anything inherent to the technology, but because there is a good deal of demand for such content without the overhead of high distribution costs. So the first things to hit P2P were, naturally, porn and copyright-infringing content.
Eventually, as more people understand how to use and take advantage of P2P distribution, it will be incorporated more and more into "legitimate" practices.
The same thing is true of anonymizing stuff. Remember the people who post complaints about someone on, say, Yahoo, and then that person gets a court order to find out who they are? This lets people be truly anonymous if they so desire.
May we never see th
Why would the DoD block Tor when the Navy is the organization funding its development?
Frankly, I don't give a damn one way or the other what someone calls someone else. I'm white. If someone wants to call me "whitey" or "cracker", I might think it's kind of funny, but other than that, it doesn't mean anything to me.
I just don't have any sympathy for people overinduling in their own victimhood. There are people starving around the world, an African continent full of AIDS, people without access to uncontaminated drinkable water, and someone is going to complain about the choice of word that someone uses to describe them, or even more ridiculously, a three-letter-acronym that happens to match up with that word? How can anyone remotely sympathize with someone complaining about this? If they really can't think of a single worthwhile issue to complain about, I'd suggest the upcoming US presidential election, which stands to significantly impact a lot more people than the term that someone uses to refer to a group of people.
May we never see th