How The NSA Targets Tor

The Guardian has released new documents from Edward Snowden showing how the U.S. National Security Agency targets internet anonymity tool Tor to gather intelligence. One of the documents, a presentation titled "Tor Stinks," bluntly acknowledges how effective the tool is: "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time. With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users, however, no success de-anonymizing a user in response to a TOPI request/on demand." (Other documents: presentation 1, presentation 2.) The NSA is able to extract information sometimes, though, and Bruce Schneier details what we know of that process in an article of his own. "The NSA creates 'fingerprints' that detect http requests from the Tor network to particular servers. These fingerprints are loaded into NSA database systems like XKeyscore, a bespoke collection and analysis tool which NSA boasts allows its analysts to see "almost everything" a target does on the internet. ... After identifying an individual Tor user on the internet, the NSA uses its network of secret internet servers to redirect those users to another set of secret internet servers, with the codename FoxAcid, to infect the user's computer. FoxAcid is an NSA system designed to act as a matchmaker between potential targets and attacks developed by the NSA, giving the agency opportunity to launch prepared attacks against their systems." Schneier explains in a related article why it's important that we figure out exactly what the NSA is doing. "Given how inept the NSA was at protecting its own secrets, it's extremely unlikely that Edward Snowden was the first sysadmin contractor to walk out the door with a boatload of them. And the previous leakers could have easily been working for a foreign government."

Comments

Govt. won't be happy

[darrellg1]

until it can monitor EVERYTHING. The end result of that will be CONTROL. Smart TVs? Built in cameras. How long until they start REQUIRING being monitored?

Re:Govt. won't be happy

[interkin3tic]

How about we not personify the government? I find it more useful. Understanding the factors and motivations at work will allow us to respond appropriately, or at least properly understand why this keeps happening.

Here's how I see it: Government agencies tend to take the path of least resistance to accomplish their assigned goals. Spy agencies goals are to monitor and identify threats. It's much easier to monitor everyone online rather than the comparatively difficult task of getting a proper subpoena for each individual being monitored.

The reason this is easier is because it's allowed by the government and tolerated by the people (at least enough to let it stand, we're not taking to the streets with torches and rope). Due process has not been updated to cover this in a way most of us feel would be appropriate. There are probably other barriers against this type of behavior that more knowledgeable people could come up with. They should be there, but they're not.

The officials in charge likely know that there is only so much they can abuse that power before it's taken away from them. If it came out that the NSA had found a way to listen in on every conversation and track you at the moment, and the public understood it and wasn't successfully distracted from it, the NSA would have it's powers trimmed. And then their job would be harder again.

So it's not that they're just voyeurs who will stop at nothing to have a live feed on your sphincter. It's more that we want to have our cake and eat it too. We want the NSA to protect us from the boogeymen terrorists, and we don't want them to spy on us either. But we're more flexible on the latter, so there you have it.

We'd need to keep limiting the NSA from taking the easiest paths we don't want them to take, but we're also lazy and apathetic as a nation.

Re:TAILS

[plover]

This quote from TFA was particularly insightful:

Other efforts mounted by the agencies include attempting to direct traffic toward NSA-operated servers, or attacking other software used by Tor users. One presentation, titled 'Tor: Overview of Existing Techniques', also refers to making efforts to "shape", or influence, the future development of Tor, in conjunction with GCHQ.

What that says is "hang on to old copies of TAILS and Tor, and don't 'upgrade' them." Sure, they're going to keep trying to attack them, but for right now this is as close to evidence as we'll ever get that says they're effective.

Foreign government?

[Hatta]

What the NSA is doing is unacceptable whether or not a foreign government access any of the data. Unless the US government obtains a warrant, based on probable cause, that specifically describes the places to be searched and things to be siezed, this activity is illegal.

Re:Instead of an Arab Spring

[i_ate_god]

so will this result in a theocratic christian government run by the bible belt?

Re:TAILS

[VortexCortex]

This is the full financial power of a Cold War military intelligence branch being directed against individual citizens. Doesn't matter what you're running, you brought a knife to a gun fight, and they brought an armor division.

Yeah, I agree. We're pretty fucked, but I do think there's hope, however. The common man is disposed to do nothing until they feel the jack-boot at their own throat. The founding fathers knew of this:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

USA Declaration of Independence.

The important thing to note is that they also gave us tools such that we would not have to throw off our government in order to fix it. We actually can fire congress. We actually can hold accountable the traitors to the constitution they swore to uphold. They keep this shit up, and more folks will come around to the idea of using them. They may have an armor division, but note that it's actually on our side. The pen is mightier than the sword, and the Army is not the NSA or CIA or individual sessions of congress.

I developed a fairly weak encryption system with hash based CBC, and a simple substitution cipher prior to XOR to reduce effectiveness of chosen plain text attacks (random throw-away nonce initialization vector also helps). It's going to be part of the reverse-DRM system for my games (give the users the power: They can ensure game updates and mods can be trusted / signed), but since it's for games and the mods are scripts not native code, and will distribute online (thus internationally), I don't need anything super secure, or copyright encumbered (so I can open & close source as needed to mitigate cheaters in online games).

I was looking at my router bandwidth log a few days ago and there was an upload of about 375 megabytes in the middle of the night, over an hour and a half 11pm to 12:30ish. No one was uploading anything here, I know for a fact. I recall a few days prior to that my Firefox browser had oddly glitched and crashed on adobe flash content (this rarely ever happens, since I don't consume much flash). The next day I noticed on my private game dev forum that a post I had made somehow got duplicated and glitched up, marking it as a global sticky announcement, and quite tellingly, none of the BBCode markup was parsed into the board's internal format -- My post somehow made it into the SQL database twice, and one copy apparently didn't go through the board's posting filter -- The posts are transactional, if the forum had glitched the DB wouldn't have been populated, let alone twice, and it would have been filtered for markup PRIOR to even touching the DB... This post was a list of all the improvements I recently made to my custom cipher. Coincidence? Yeah, right.

In addition to being a cryptographer, I frequently make politically inciteful comments (see above), and since I make games as a hobby research some crazy stuff for plot ideas, sometimes I post in-character as a machine mastermind; And am also writing a novel about machines holding the government for ransom. (Spoiler: the machines autopiloted airplanes into bulidings as a show of force on 9/11 to get the government to expand the world wide neural network... you can imagine red flags everywhere doing research and collaborative writing for that, eh?) I also tinker with electronics hardware and hobby OSs coded in ASM and my own toy languages. Being that I email enc@nsa.gov directly to comply with encryptio