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Tor Used To Collect Embassy Email Passwords
Several readers wrote in to inform us that Swedish security researcher Dan Egerstad has revealed how he collected 100 passwords from embassies and governments worldwide, without hacking into anything: he sniffed Tor exit routers. Both Ars and heise have writeups on Egerstad's blog post, but neither adds much to the original. It's not news that unencrypted traffic exits the Tor network unencrypted, but Egerstad correctly perceived, and called attention to, the lack of appreciation for this fact in organizations worldwide.
...of a guy in a class I took who had packet sniffed our network, then reported my university e-mail password to me. Why? Because the university refused to enable SSL-secured POP3. A quick email reveals that, in fact, they were never planning to, and that I am just SOL.
Palm trees and 8
Working at a ISP I know for a fact that the RCMP use to monitor the traffic of several embassies with a server installed at the ISP end.
Well, the embassies should have used this new technology called "encryption". I heard that in the future, even browsers will support it...
eknagy
Tor uses the concept of 'onion routing' to obscure the source and destination of content passed through it. What this means is that, like an onion, content is wrapped in multiple layers of destinations and buried in the ground (or routed) until, after a delay, shoots come up (the headers are interpreted and the onion is passed to another destination) and ultimately the onion is ready to be dug out of the ground (the content reaches its destination).
Unfortunately, it's possible to tell it's still an onion by the time it reaches your house. And that's what this article is referring to. If you wrapped an apple in an onion (used secure public key encryption) then you have an additional layer of security. That's a whole nother layer of complication, however.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
if you voluntary place the said man in the middle?
Of course Embassy officials have something to hide. In fact this raises a superb example of one of the legitimate, and useful, needs for Tor. There are a lot of people, mostly in law enforcement, who'd like to see all anonymity, and especially Tor, shut down. And I'm not just referring to Communist China.
And let us not forget that Onion routing was first officially developed, and published, by the U.S. Navy back in the 90's.
Now if only Slashdot would allow me to post via lynx through Tor. "Anonymous" my butt.
I'd hate to be around when you bake a pie.
I doubt the users from these governments were using TOR to check their mail. More likely that hackers had already compromised the accounts and were using them to check the email accounts anonymously.
-AC
Um. Have you ever used Tor? Did you read the article or even the summary? There is NO MENTION of any vunerabilites in Tor. You are implying that Tor is back doored or somehow otherwise vunerable. This is not the case or what happened here. The information gathering occured via sniffing of an exit router.
Charles Wyble System Engineer
Unless he built his own Tor node, joined the network, then captured his proxied traffic - which is something ANY Tor admin could do, in which case its STILL not particulary insightful, cool, or 31337.
That's exactly what he did. The entire point of him doing so was (he claims) to demonstrate that people using TOR are not protected from anyone reading traffic that comes out the exit nodes if they don't bother to encrypt the traffic they send into TOR.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Someone who sits between sender and recepient who exchange unencrypted data can sniff it? Impossible! Stunning news!
/. should implement irony tags.
Which reminds me,
Seriously, people. OF COURSE that works! Man in the middle, anyone? Where's the big deal? I'm kinda glad someone finally points it out and that it affects some high profile target like an embassy so some people (read: politicians and other, similar entities) will actually realize that this is possible and being done, but the answers here scare me almost more.
I mean, here, we're supposedly a hint more educated than Joe Schmoe Average Browser, right? News for Nerds is hardly Weekly World News, I'd say. And still, we got people posting tinfoil crap like "Developed by $three_letter_agency" or "of course it has to have holes, it's from the EFF". WTF? Folks? Get a grip. From the exit node to the server it's as unencrypted as it would be from you to the server if you didn't use TOR. That's neither a flaw, nor an implementation error, nor some CIA/NSA/WTF conspiracy. It's simply the way the net works, if you don't use some kind of SSL encryption between the communication partners!
Sometimes I really wonder...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Indeed. This isn't a problem with TOR per se. If I'm reading the blog post correctly, the security issue he is really identifying is: "don't mix an anonymizer with identifiable actions."
Quite simply, TOR is a system to anonymize, so that the website you are going to can't tell who you are. (e.g. can't correlate between repeated visits, can't use your IP to track you down, etc.) As long as you a surfing in a non-identifiable way, even the exit node doesn't know anything about you, and can't determine which requests came from you, as opposed to someone else in the TOR network.
However, if you use TOR in an identifiable way, such as sending a plaintext email (which has plaintext "To" and "From" fields), then you're not using TOR properly. You are inherently exposing yourself, and the exit node can now learn quite a bit about you. If you are connecting to resources without encryption, then the exit node can sniff the data.
Normally, though, you wouldn't use TOR in combination with a secure site you are logging into, anyway. (What's the point in anonymizing your IP address if you log in with your easily-identifiable username, anyways? The site is obviously going to identify you!) So, really, you should not just turn TOR on and then forget about it, because you shouldn't be sending your email through TOR, nor logging into sites using TOR.
The lesson to learn from his blog post, which he doesn't state plainly enough, is that you should split your web-usage into categories:
1. When browsing in a non-identifiable way, use TOR if you want anonymity.
2. When accessing/logging-in to a trusted resource, don't use TOR. (This includes email, etc.)
3. If you need to access a specific resource while maintaining anonymity, use TOR but make sure you use strong end-to-end encryption for the entire session (and not merely encryption for the login phase).
This is, at least, my understanding. Corrections and clarifications are welcome.
You can use it in a personally identifying way if what you want to conceal is not your identity but rather your location, or you have a need to communicate securely at your local end so that others at your end won't know where you're going.
There's a balance to be struck with anonymity and security and where you strike it depends on what aspects need to be anonymous and what other aspects need to be secure.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?