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Attacking and Defending the Tor Network
Trailrunner7 writes "In a talk at the USENIX LEET workshop Tuesday, Nick Mathewson of the Tor Project discussed the group's recent challenges in responding to suppression efforts by governments in Egypt, China and elsewhere. What the Tor members have learned in these recent incidents is that while governments are becoming more up front about their willingness to shut off Internet access altogether or censor content, users are also becoming more resourceful. Mathewson said that the group is working on methods for alleviating the problems that national-level restrictions cause for Tor users. One method involves moving to a modular transport method in order to get around some of the throttling that ISPs perform on encrypted traffic in order to make Tor usage more difficult. In a separate talk at LEET, Stevens LeBlond of INRIA in France presented research on methods for tracing Tor users back to their IP address. One of the attacks, which LeBlond and his co-authors titled 'Bad Apple,' used an exit node that the researchers controlled in order to trace the streams of data sent by users of BitTorrent over Tor back to their IP addresses."
Information is like water and it will always find a way to get through.
... and it was too slow to do anything at all.
meh...
I guess that the research demonstrated by Stevens LeBlond just goes to prove what most of us have known for a long time - even using TOR (and the same will go for any other type of encryption, IP masking etc) you are not 100% safe if somebody wants to work out who you are. The governments may not care too much if you are just sharing a few pirated movies around, although some companies may, but I can guarantee that those carrying out the real illegal activity, such as sharing child-pr0n, will be tracked down one way or another.
All that TOR does is provides people who aren't really that switched-on with a false sense of security about their activities.
So where is this peer-to-peer (as in user nodes, not IPS peers) internet people talk about from time to time?
If people have mobile devices, is there a way they can create ad hoc networks that use nothing but the tools at hand? That is, not even the cell towers, but just the mesh of devices?
Its already happened that one man was charged with felony and lost for defacing a site that was done through his computer that was a tor exit node.
I just wish I had my webcam recording the look on my face...
I'd like to see better integration with Tor and Chrome's Incognito Mode. Normal plain-jane internet route for all my apps, but route all incognito traffic through Tor. Otherwise, I find it a pain in the rear (not to mention more error prone) to keep toggling OSX between "performance mode" and "tinfoil hat mode." Doesn't really matter what I'm viewing in tinfoil hat mode, I just would rather have the same kind of barriers on my local cookie/history storage as I have out in the world.
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Steganography. Make it impossible to determine what traffic is encrypted by embedding the encrypted traffic as noise in, say, a video extolling the virtues of the dictator.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
everywhere
supported by western governments
you would be correct to assert that western officials have their heads up their asses and won't immediately grasp that tor is a friend, not an enemy, and an excellent way to bring down beijing, tehran, havana, and harare cheaply. but they'll warm up to the possibilities
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Steganography. Make it impossible to determine what traffic is encrypted by embedding the encrypted traffic as noise in, say, a video extolling the virtues of the dictator.
and when the secret police begin asking the right questions about the source of the video, what then?
Steganography is all about blending into the background.
Not drawing attention to yourself.
Recently discussed on Bruce Schneier's blog ("Identifying Tor Users Through Insecure Applications"):
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/03/identifying_tor.html
IP over Avian Carrier could bypass the problem entirely! http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html
Is Stevens LeBlond a Touhou fan? Why'd he call it "Bad Apple"?
I used to think that it's the lack of exit nodes that makes TOR somewhat slow until I tried some internal services, i.e. *.onion. So I proceeded to configure an unthrottled intermediate node on a box with a 100/100 Mb/s connection. After 1-2 weeks of warming up, the node routed over 1 TB of traffic _daily_. As my monthly cap is 5 TB, I had to throttle it, unfortunately.
TL;DR: If you have spare bandwidth and want to help the TOR network without the potential risks of an exit node, please setup an intermediate node.
According to Michael Reed, one of TOR's creators, TOR was actually made for US Gov open source intelligence gathering, with the 'public' user base providing cover noise.
Via cryptome:
"The original *QUESTION* posed that led to the
invention of Onion Routing was, "Can we build a system that allows for
bi-directional communications over the Internet where the source and
destination cannot be determined by a mid-point?" The *PURPOSE* was for
DoD / Intelligence usage (open source intelligence gathering, covering
of forward deployed assets, whatever). Not helping dissidents in
repressive countries. Not assisting criminals in covering their
electronic tracks. Not helping bit-torrent users avoid MPAA/RIAA
prosecution. Not giving a 10 year old a way to bypass an anti-porn
filter. Of course, we knew those would be other unavoidable uses for
the technology, but that was immaterial to the problem at hand we were
trying to solve (and if those uses were going to give us more cover
traffic to better hide what we wanted to use the network for, all the
better...I once told a flag officer that much to his chagrin)"
Here's just some.
That link didn't work until I appended this line to my hosts file:
85.214.111.134 events.ccc.de
Is this just a United States problem?
The only reason Tor still works is because it is useful for intelligence agencies to collect data. If China ran more exit nodes than the Western agencies, they could use them for censorship/impersonation/falsification. Or they could just use them for the same thing, to spy on their citizens. Who knows how many nodes are already under Chinese government control? They certainly have the means.