Tor Open To Attack

An anonymous reader writes "A group of researchers have written a paper that lays out an attack against Tor (PDF) in enough detail to cause Roger Dingledine a fair amount of heartburn. The essential avenue of attack is that Tor doesn't verify claims of uptime or bandwidth, allowing an attacker to advertise more than it need deliver, and thus draw traffic. If the attacker controls the entry and exit node and has decent clocks, then the attacker can link these together and trace someone through the network."

Comments

How Many Nodes Do You Need to Own?

[quanticle]

"We show that even if an adversary can control a few malicious nodes -- 3 to 6 with a PlanetLab network of 60 honest servers -- the adversary can still compromise the identity of a significant fraction of the connections from new clients."

3 to 6 servers out of 60 is still 5 to 10 percent. That's fine for small networks, but for a network with hundreds or thousands of nodes, controlling 5 to 10 percent may become infeasible. Does this attack require the number of nodes to scale with network size?

Re:WTFITOREH?

[Nasarius]

Come on, if you're going to troll, at least put some effort into it. Nowhere in the summary is it mentioned that Tor is an acronym. It's not written as TOR. Those ignorant of the project would assume that it was just a silly name.

Re:WTFITOREH?

[Ephemeriis]

I hate to point this out but to anyone not in the know. the Acronym TOR means absolutely NOTHING. why post a warning about something if you do not explain the acronym. WHAT THE HELL IS WITH THE EXCESSIVE ACRONYMS? You all afraid to speak a fully qualified language or are you all afraid someone might notice you have no idea what the hell you're talking about? How about expanding on the acronyms a bit eh?
Thanks.

To anyone not in the know, the fact that the TOR protocol has a weakness means absolutely NOTHING regardless of whether they know what TOR stands for or not.

Granted, there is such a thing as TLA-overload...but I don't think this is it. If you don't know that TOR stands for The Onion Router, then why the hell do you care whether it is vulnerable to attack or not? You obviously aren't using it... You don't care about the technology or implementation... You are apparently not even curious enough to Google it... So why bother clicking through to post such a rant?

Re:Could this be avoided?

[Kjella]

Omnipotence is hardly required. "Moving it around" doesn't happen on the same timescale as tracking it down, I'm sure it'd only take a few minutes with pro gear and at least two listening posts to cross-reference. Generating a new MAC from time to time then reconnecting would probably work just fine though, so that when they come for the old MAC address it's no longer broadcasting. Basicly, if it's still active when they come looking, you've pretty much already lost.

Re:Well, not just that.

[bhsx]

Of course there are going to be police at protests. Blending in with the crowd just makes it easier to take care of things if an incident occurs. Is this supposed to be surprising, scandalous, conspiratorial? Because it's not. It's perfectly logical to anyone with a lick of sense. This is from the second link of the GP:

The officers hoist protest signs. They hold flowers with mourners. They ride in bicycle events. At the vigil for the cyclist, an officer in biking gear wore a button that said, "I am a shameless agitator." She also carried a camera and videotaped the roughly 15 people present. Beyond collecting information, some of the undercover officers or their associates are seen on the tape having influence on events. At a demonstration last year during the Republican National Convention, the sham arrest of a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders. Perfectly logical? Really?