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Spying On Tor
juct writes "The long-standing suspicion that the anonymizing network TOR is abused to catch sensitive data by Chinese, Russian, and American government agencies as well as hacking groups gets new support.
Members of the Teamfurry community found TOR exit-nodes which only forward unencrypted versions of certain protocols. These peculiar configurations invite speculation as to why they are set up in this way. Another tor exit node has been caught doing MITM attacks using fake SSL certificates."
You have to know what you're doing to have security. I know it's getting old, but plug-in security simply does not exist.
This is what happens in a knee-jerk-reaction-based society. You point out a security flaw, instantly identifying yourself as a security threat, get thrown into jail and while your very public trial is going on, the real bad guys are utilizing the very security flaws you found to do Bad Things(TM).
Good grief.
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
I've seen ssh MITM attempts myself with tor, but this can easily be avoided by ensuring you check your fingerprints. You do check your fingerprints, don't you?
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
> Members of the Teamfurry community found TOR exit-nodes which only forward unencrypted versions of certain protocols.
Are they worried that the Chinese will intercept pictures of them dressed like this?
How does anyone expect anonymity? Traffic must somewhere go through ISPs, most of which rent their upstream from large providers like AT&T, who is surely not the only large corporation to get in bed with the government or anyone else who can pay. Enough of that information loaded into a database and compared will yield information about the suspect, even if it's too complex to explain to a "jury of your peers."
If you want anonymity, SSH through a string of compromised Eastern European servers to a comfortably log-agnostic Indonesian ISP, and do all your surfing through Lynx/Links. That's the only stab at anonymity you'll get, and they'll probably just install a keylogger anyway. Freedom is slavery.
technical writing / development
Perhaps the problem is that using an anonymizer makes someone a more interesting target to authorities. Like the old adage of attacking the bank because "that's where the money is," perhaps some people are attacking Tor because "that's where the secrets are."
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
1. set up a data-laundering haven
2. advertise amongst the warez people and criminal element
3. let enough criminal traffic (drug trafficking info) go through to build up trust that the laundering 'really works'
4. Wait around for the stuff that is important (like nuclear codes or enemy state intel)
5. ???
6. Promoted to section chief at the invisible mansion! (Profit!)
I don't have one lick of proof to say that our friends in Maryland or their cousins in Langley set this thing up from the beginning, other than it's an obvious slam dunk for them. I don't think the NSA is monitoring certain ports, I think they own the whole thing.
davejenkins.com |
Huh? You make no sense. SSL is private-key encryption. Every browser I have ever touched does offer a solution for checking against MITM attacks, namely by warning if the certificate is self-signed or doesn't match the site that sent it.
Tor was never intended to SECURE traffic. It is an ANOMYMISER. It is designed to cope with compromised nodes and still provide military grade anonymity.
It's important to remember that security and anonymity are different things.
This is how the loudness war is killing music.
This is a little reminder that we need a lot more users and exit nodes before TOR is reasonably safe.
This is a little reminder to encrypt your data end-to-end rather than through another network; anonymity is not security.
This is a little reminder that you really do need to check your SSL certificates.
TOR's encryption fools some into thinking it is a security model. It is not. TOR facilitates anonymous transactions using encryption internally. It eliminates the possibility of people spying on you by name, but it does not stop them from spying on "the people" (which includes you). You still need another encrypted transaction between you and your endpoint for real security.
The more exit nodes there are, the less likely a snooping entity will get ahold of your data. The more users there are, the more data those snoops need to filter through to get something meaningful (caveat: statistical analysis. workaround: encrypt data past the TOR network).
This is a call-to-arms; everybody needs to use encryption and anonymization to enable the system to work, otherwise somebody can set up a few nets and read the whole network's content, even brute-force decrypt it due to its low volume. Take a look at what Zimmerman's justification for PGP:
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I can't quite see how a SSL MITM attack works. Wouldn't the SSL certificate have to be registered for use with a specific domain? Could anyone explain how this would work?
Hi all. I'm one of the Tor authors.
We're trying very hard to get out the message that you should always use encrypted protocols over Tor, if you're doing anything even slightly sensitive.
Right now, we do this in our documentation, and in a list of warnings on our download page. But obviously, this isn't good enough, since some of the commenters here seem to be surprised at finding it out.
Does anybody have good ideas about how to get the word out better?
(As for the SSL MITM thing: we've run into situations like this one before. Usually, it turns out that the exit node isn't doing the MITM itself, but is getting MITMd itself by its upstream. This happens depressingly often in some countries, and in some dormitories. I've dropped a line to the directory authority operators Mike Perry (the guy who maintains the Torbutton firefox plugin) has been working on an automated detection tool for this stuff. It would be great if somebody with programming chops would step up and give him a hand.)
Tor gives you pretty robust anonymity, it just doesn't provide privacy.
Is this not what that swedish hacker said?
Is this not what anyone with a basic understanding of the most basic network/TCP concepts (ports, IP addresses, connections, that sort of thing) should have realized, if they read anything about Tor? Is this not something that the Tor project should have explained in clear language for those who do NOT have a basic understanding of networking?
It's beyond "untrusted". It's a hostile network and blatantly so, if you bother to read even a basic description of it. You should assume that your traffic will be routed out a node where a person, organization, or government is passively monitoring or actively attacking your traffic.
All this (repeated) fuss demonstrates is how many incompetent network/sysadmin people there are in the world, and how few people in the press and "blogging" community understand networking. Any idiot who knows ALL of the reasons why ssh is better than telnet (ie, answers more than just "it's encrypted, so people can't see what you're typing") should be able to tell you why Tor is a hostile network...unless they're just parroting what they've read elsewhere.
Please help metamoderate.
Military grade anonymity?
What?
Sure, we all know - or think we know - what "military grade crypto" means[1], but now you're just making stuff up.
Military grade anonymity, indeed.
[1] Strong crypto managed in a Type 0 or Type 1, etc., system, where everything is kept secret, hardware and software are tightly controlled, and updates are distributed strictly out-of-band - think spies with briefcases handcuffed to their wrists.
Contrast with "commercial grade crypto", where everything but the secret/private keys themselves are known, well studied, well understood, etc., and updates are distributed in-band, though sometimes "boot strapped" using an OOB shared secret, etc.
There is the perception that "military grade" is somehow stronger than "commercial grade", but what is the basis for this perception? None of us can say, least not here.
To know - to really know - whether military grade crypto is actually any stronger than commercial grade crypto requires a degree of access which itself requires clearance at - or above - top secret, said clearance being predicated on the understanding that those with said access won't reveal what they know, on pain of prosecution.
So the people who do know cannot and will not tell.
You'll just have to take my word for it. :->
"Military grade anonymity" is nothing more than buzzspeak for "anonymity that we think is really, really OMG PONIES good, but we can't prove, what with there being a complete and total lack of mathematically sound anonymity analytics comparable to cryptanalysis, so there, nyah!"
I'm here EdgeKeep Inc.
As the article has repeated, if you're interested in security it seems you really ought to apply your own encryption on top of TOR.
However, even if you do that are you truly anonymous? Is there any way to determine both ends of a conversation (either email or sessions)?
There's no way to guarantee that your communications over TOR are anonymous, and they're pretty upfront about that in the documentation. It's pretty easy for a government (or just about anybody, really) to add enough nodes to TOR to have a reasonable likelihood of being all three nodes in your conversation (entrance, middle, and exit). The nodes need to be geographically distributed, but that's easy for governments and easier for hackers, who have access to botnets of machines all over the world. Once they've got enough nodes out there, it's pretty easy to tell who's sending all that traffic, and where it's going.
Again, adding encryption helps keep your data from being sniffed (as long as you know you're not hit by MITM, see other comments about PKI), but TOR doesn't protect your anonymity against a sophisticated (and reasonably well-funded) attacker.