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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."
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
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.
Tor is so easy to abuse (if you run a tor server) it's not even funny. Just take a look at the code, it's trivial to hack. It's funny how much of the OSS community are proverbial sheeple, believing that since it's open source, it must be secure.
It's for exactly this reason that Tor should adopt AGPL. That way, if the Chinese government ran a hacked Tor server, they would have to release the source code as well and the hack would be obvious.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
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.
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.
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.
The problem is, a couple hours after suing the Chinese, you want to sue them again.
It's not a "plug in security" solution, and it's not meant to protect your traffic from people snooping on it in transit. If you want that, you need to use some sort of end-to-end encryption on top of Tor. (And you need to use some form of encryption that doesn't positively identify you, or else you might as well not use Tor to begin with.)
These kind of "attacks" are trivial because they have nothing to do with Tor's actual function. They're taking advantage of user stupidity, not a design flaw.
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