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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.
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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
(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.
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.
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 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.
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.
... 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?