Group Thinks Anonymity Should Be Baked Into the Internet Itself Using Tor

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "David Talbot writes at MIT Technology review that engineers on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an informal organization of engineers that changes Internet code and operates by rough consensus, have asked the architects of Tor to consider turning the technology into an Internet standard. If widely adopted, such a standard would make it easy to include the technology in consumer and business products ranging from routers to apps and would allow far more people to browse the Web without being identified by anyone who might be spying on Internet traffic. The IETF is already working to make encryption standard in all web traffic. Stephen Farrell believes that forging Tor into a standard that interoperates with other parts of the Internet could be better than leaving Tor as a separate tool that requires people to take special action to implement. 'I think there are benefits that might flow in both directions,' says Farrell. 'I think other IETF participants could learn useful things about protocol design from the Tor people, who've faced interesting challenges that aren't often seen in practice. And the Tor people might well get interest and involvement from IETF folks who've got a lot of experience with large-scale systems.' Andrew Lewman, executive director of Tor, says the group is considering it. 'We're basically at the stage of 'Do we even want to go on a date together?' It's not clear we are going to do it, but it's worth exploring to see what is involved. It adds legitimacy, it adds validation of all the research we've done.'"

Comments

interesting

[ganjadude]

I like the concept, however If we are going to turn tor into a standard would it not make more sense to start from scratch and create a new standard based on tor instead? for all of tors advantages there are numerous disadvantages.

Re:interesting

[aaaaaaargh!]

Many if not most existing standards have turned out to be fairly mediocre from a security point of view, think of cell phone and wireless encryption for example. There is also some evidence from the Snowden leak that standards procedures and committees have been weakened by members acting overtly or secretly on behalf of government agencies. So they should be really cautious about such offers.

And why re-invent the wheel and make something fro scratch? Tor is working well, even too well in the eye of some people ...

Re:interesting

[Joce640k]

If you can tap into/analyze the internet backbones (as the NSA can) then Tor isn't very anonymous. They can track packets and figure out who's really connected to who even though the packets are relayed.

I don't know if this can easily be fixed, but now would be the time to do it.

Re:interesting

[jones_supa]

Let's still not forget that even if they end up designing a system which has some disadvantages, it would still be zillion times better than the current system. I just don't want this plan to be discontinued because some perfectionist nerd found some theoretical flaw from it, which can only be exploited by milking a Mongolian horse under full moon. That being said, of course we should still try to make as robust system as possible.

Re:interesting

[Captain Hook]

The problem is, the NSA budget allows for a lot of mongolian horses so there is always one available for milking at the appropriate time.

Re:interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the point. TOR does NOT work well. It's too easy to compromise with a bogus exit node.
TOR is not safe. Not at all.

Re:interesting

[jellomizer]

They are disadvantage on almost every thing out there.

You can pine on the disadvantages, or you can rate them and see how to fix them, without cutting into an other advantage, or increasing an other disadvantage.

Normally if a protocol is Fast, it is unsecured. if it is Secure, it is slow. If it is complex and full featured, there are a lot of failures in implementation, if it is solid, there is a lot less features.

Life is full of tradeoffs, Stop pining on the road you didn't take, and work on the road you took to make it better.

Re:interesting

[Thor Ablestar]

Normally if a protocol is Fast, it is unsecured. if it is Secure, it is slow.

Look at CJDNS. It's fast, simple and reasonably secure. While it doesn't officially provide anonymity, it's IMHO difficult enough to breach it's anonymity without disproportional waste of sniffing equipment. The NSA or KGB sniffers on backbone just aren't enough.

Re:interesting

[jones_supa]

It would still be an improvement. Obtaining those horses would create an extra step for NSA. All the ways you can make the spying process even slightly harder for NSA is good, as they currently can basically just set up taps almost anywhere and start listening without too much effort.

Re:interesting

[Joce640k]

...and if you're the NSA you'll also up your own Tor nodes, which helps considerably.

Re:interesting

[Joce640k]

Yes. One of the best defenses is to make it expensive for them to do.

Re:interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

The purpose of Tor is to allow you to connect to endpoints that need not be point-to-point encrypted aka ordinary web pages. There is no way you can make the exit nodes secure under this model, or at least none has been found so far.

Or let me ask differently: How would you fix it? A web of trusted exit nodes run by the government of choice? :P

Re:interesting

[Connie_Lingus]

really LOL??

since when is cost a consideration for a government that is already $17trillion dollars in debt?

Re:interesting

[Kjella]

It's not quite as simple as that, you can do many things that like padding things out to fixed sizes so you can't see JPG of 185254 bytes move through the network, but say only 256kb blocks. You can wait for other packets to come in and only multiple blocks at once so there's no clear link between which come in and which go out. You can pad things with dummy traffic so it appears you're routing it to several different nodes, that you're not the end point when you are and that you're not the starting point when you are. Those things are solvable as long as they only have backbone access.

The much harder problem is if they can run poison nodes and in a public network there's really no reason to think they won't. Particularly if they have the ability to interrupt your connections to non-poison nodes they'll quickly and easily trap you in a net where everyone you're talking to is the NSA and the supposed anonymity in routing and relaying traffic is gone. One compromised server in a TOR circuit isn't so bad, but if they have two - particularly the first and last - then you're pretty much boned. At least as far as anonymity is concerned, you can of course still wrap the actual traffic in https or PGP or whatever else for security.

Re:interesting

[Antique Geekmeister]

Many security projects have also been deliberately crippled by cooperation with US export encryption regulations, and by the laws concerning suveillance capability for audio communications. These laws require "law enforcement" access to the communications. While Tor might skirt these regulations as not serving text, many fundamental encryption and anonymization technologies would directly block such monitoring.

Re:interesting

[Charliemopps]

Yes, but this is currently only a problem because there are very few exit nodes. What if EVERY user was an exit node? What if "Contains TOR Privacy!" would become a sales point on routers? If the exit nodes were in the millions and then chosen at random by the client, it would pretty much be impossible for a Government to gather information from a bogus exit now because they'd statistical only collect data from 1 user, chosen at random, at a time. Not only that, but since everyone would be using it, rather than TOR being a honey pot of people with "something to hide" in the governments opinion, it would now be flooded with Facebook posts and people surfing porn.

I think that the only thing that would do them a lot of good, and I'm not even sure it's possible, but if they could distribute your connection over several nodes, that would be a game changer. If while using TOR you could use the remaining amount of bandwidth in full, you'd be doing great. Currently you're stuck with whatever speed the exit node has, but if you could exit on multiple IPs like some new phones do then you could use several exit nodes.

Re:interesting

[Catbeller]

Where was all this concern about the debt when Reagan and Bush W. were cutting taxes, emptying the Social Security trust fund, and spending madly on military and spy agencies? When Reagan took office, the debt was 3 trillion. When Bush took office, it was 6 trillion. Clinton actually paid the debt down a half trillion in his final year: Bush immediately declared the surplus the people's money and gave the surplus back - then raised spending until he left the country another extra six 6 trillion in debt, with obligations to pay for wars and refund the money stolen from the SS trust fund since 1984. Republicans cut taxes and raise spending, run up the debt, have a rich man's party, then step back and let Democrats take all the blame and make the spending cuts and tax increases to try to repair the damage. This has been a thirty+ year tax-cut-based robbery. And always, always an excuse to cut aid to the poor, never the rich.

Re:interesting

[f3rret]

If you can tap into/analyze the internet backbones (as the NSA can) then Tor isn't very anonymous. They can track packets and figure out who's really connected to who even though the packets are relayed.

I don't know if this can easily be fixed, but now would be the time to do it.

They can't identify EVERYONE, and they cannot identify anyone in real time.

Re:interesting

[f3rret]

...and if you're the NSA you'll also up your own Tor nodes, which helps considerably.

This, however, they can (and probably already are) do.

Re:interesting

[AmiMoJo]

Tor is resilient to that kind of analysis. For example it will combine packets together and pad them with dummy data before forwarding them. The NSA sees an encrypted packet go in but it never comes out again, only a different packet that may contain one or more other packets and is encrypted with a different key emerges.

Tor only has one major vulnerability, assuming you use it perfectly. That vulnerability is the NSA controlling a significant number of nodes on the Tor network. It would have to be an awful lot though, and current leaks suggest that they have not been able to do it yet. All their current attacks rely on the user making a mistake.

Re:interesting

[UltraZelda64]

While I do agree with you, an interesting negative to that would be:

If everyone runs their own Tor exit node, including unknowingly every dumb Windows and Mac user out there, then malware writers (the NSA?) would have a field day writing bad stuff that attacks and takes advantage of a very large number of exit nodes. So which is better: fewer exit nodes but a few known bad ones as it is now, or shitloads of exit nodes where the vast majority cannot be trusted? All it would take is one major outbreak to basically destroy Tor's purpose...

Re:interesting

[Connie_Lingus]

according to the u.s. constitution, Congress allocates spending.

just fyi...and also I would like to know where in my comment I specifically blamed any one political party for the national debt?

Re:interesting

[WaffleMonster]

There is also some evidence from the Snowden leak that standards procedures and committees have been weakened by members acting overtly or secretly on behalf of government agencies. So they should be really cautious about such offers.

In some ways IETF is almost a joke. "Consensus" building is supposed to be the key to movement yet there is no barrier to entry other than having sufficient number of brain cells to send a message to a mailing list. I have observed several instances of "ballot stuffing" where hoards of random people who very likely know and have contributed nothing at the last moment express support for x. The arbiter of what consensus means is always WG chair(s) who themselves mostly always work for a corporations with skin in the game.

The IETF process is most successful as a middle ground where there is market incentive to work together. In the case of tor there is no market to speak of to incentivize such behavior.

And why re-invent the wheel and make something fro scratch? Tor is working well, even too well in the eye of some people ...

My guess they might start with existing specification and evolve standard based on IETF process.

An example of this SSL v3 was mostly Netscape's doing while TLS v1 and later were products of the IETF. In this case there were no radical changes between versions and backwards compatibility was retained. There was also huge market incentive for broad compatibility and getting security right.

Re:interesting

[noh8rz10]

There's no such thing as absolute privacy. you need to ask, privacy from whom. If you want privacy at a coffeeshop, use a VPN client so you don't get packet sniffed. If you want privacy at your home (shared) computer, clear your browser cache. If you want privacy from the servers you're connecting to, then TOR may be a good option. If you want privacy from NSA, then forget about it. It's best to assume the entire internet is a military resource, and you have guest privileges.

Re:interesting

[colordev]

Thank's fot the FUDBAR. Now tell us what is safe and what will better promote peoples privacy, democracy and the development of human rights.

> Just to remind you Mr. Anonymous Coward a hundred of million persons were killed by their own governments during the last century. What makes you think govermnents 20 years from now will not execute jews, communists, homosexuals, retards or gypsies like they did in Germany(in 1930-40's), or they will not execute people living in cities or wearing glasses, Buddhist monks, Muslims, Christians, Western-educated intellectuals or educated people in general or people who had had contact with Western countries or with Vietnam, or with any previous government, or disabled people, or the ethnic Chinese, Laotians or Vietnamese like they did in Cambodia (in 1970's), or they will not execute capitalists like they did in Soviet Union(in 1920's), or will not execute muslims like they did in Bosnia-Herzegovina (in 1990's), or will not execute Tutsies like they did in Rwanda(in 1990's), or they will not execute the well educated class like they did in China (in 1960's), or they will not randomly kill people of other religious groups like they did in Iraq (in 2000's) or they will not bomb to pieces urban areas which do appear to be supportive to a currently reigning dictator like is happening in Syria (in 2013).

Now pick your country for the next decade, Are you feeling lucky, punk? or maybe you still like the current development e.g. the great firewall of China and some high profile websites starting to use HTTPS.

I think TOR-like backbone to the future Internet is a great idea. Some tweaking, sweat, toil and tears and it will be a great system.

Re:interesting

[Thor Ablestar]

When I say "reasonably secure" it means that I personally read it's whitepaper and tried to value it's security personally. And I see some methods that can be employed to breach the anonymity of system implemented according to this whitepaper. They exist but they require a disproportional amount of sniffers. The giant NSA/KGB datacenter that diverts and sniffs all the backbone traffic is just not enough. And since the system is totally encrypted and inherently immune to MITM then many popular deanonimization methods will fail, too.

And I look at such systems from deanonymization point of view only since the end to end encryption is trivial now.

Re:interesting

[Jane Q. Public]

"Or let me ask differently: How would you fix it? A web of trusted exit nodes run by the government of choice? :P"

No. Everybody here is missing the point.

If/when exit nodes are everywhere, hosted by everybody, two things happen:

(A) It becomes impractical to the point of impossibility to monitor all the exit nodes, and at the same time

(B) the VALUE of monitoring any given exit node is diluted far past the point of making it worth anybody's time.

Re:interesting

[Jane Q. Public]

"If everyone runs their own Tor exit node, including unknowingly every dumb Windows and Mac user out there, then malware writers (the NSA?) would have a field day writing bad stuff that attacks and takes advantage of a very large number of exit nodes. So which is better: fewer exit nodes but a few known bad ones as it is now, or shitloads of exit nodes where the vast majority cannot be trusted? All it would take is one major outbreak to basically destroy Tor's purpose..."

This is not a real concern. It would be ridiculously easy for independent malware checkers to detect this.

Not to mention that it is highly illegal for the government to do that. Regardless of the recent revelations that they DID do that... it's still illegal. Than can be and are being sued over it.

Re:interesting

[nctritech]

CJDNS lets you use web browsers. That immediately makes it a useless way to develop secure communications that less technical people can use. All it takes is one line of JavaScript to unmask your real IP address. You disabled JavaScript? Well now most of the web doesn't work. How useless is that?

It's still a valiant and interesting effort. The security of it is still debatable.

Re:interesting

[dewrox]

If everyone runs their own Tor exit node, including unknowingly every dumb Windows and Mac user out there, then malware writers (the NSA?) would have a field day writing bad stuff that attacks and takes advantage of a very large number of exit nodes. So which is better: fewer exit nodes but a few known bad ones as it is now, or shitloads of exit nodes where the vast majority cannot be trusted?

In my mind this is not interesting but rather bordering flamebait. How is what you propose any different than what exists now? Malware writers are having a field day right now with all of the unsecured exit nodes. ( yes you are an exit node on the internet, regardless if you are a tor exit node ) So the true question is would you rather have a greater possibility of retaining your privacy, or just keep living in a deluded fantasy where you think you have any semblance of privacy when you don't? Don't be the one to drink the cool-aid, it never turns out good for that person.

Re:interesting

[Thor Ablestar]

In Soviet Russia Reading doesn't punish YOU! Punishable are only posting, hosting and refusing to filter. Posters should care of their security theirselves, be it disabling of JavaScript or booting a specially crafted anonymous Linux. Webhosting does not need Javascript or browsers. Refusing to filter is ISP crime, not bloggers, and I have a sincere hope that earlier or later the loss of reputation will be less than fines for non-filtering.

And BTW. The earlier the FSB catches all the young Nazi fools for posting a hate speech and they are sentenced to broom the streets - the earlier the Internet security practices will become mainstream. Darwin rulez.

Re:interesting

[UltraZelda64]

One, you could argue that it is "ridiculously easy" for security programs to check anti-virus software, period, but people still get screwed--whether it's because they have not kept up to date on something, haven't kept their antivirus subscription going, or their program just didn't catch it.

Two, you really think the NSA gives a flying fuck if something is "illegal"? Really? Literally all of the information we have so far on them thanks to Edward Snowden only proves that they don't give a rat's ass about what is "legal" or not, and the agency is run by a scumbag who will lie under oath to Congress and the entire population of United States of America and try to cover it up. Their "top-secret" information blatantly says that they break any law they have to (or want to) if it will suit them--and anything that seems questionable, they will try to twist their interpretation around so it fits you so they can "claim" that they're somehow following the law.

Fuck them.

Re:interesting

[strikethree]

Hm. Less than 1% of my internet traffic is web browsing. A very sizable chunk (random number) 40% is very latency sensitive.

Why would I want to participate in this? It would make 40% of my internet traffic utterly useless and would be pointless for 99% of my traffic.

Isn't Tor compromised?

[dbIII]

Wasn't there an article here earlier about how it's not so difficult as earlier imagined to track inputs and output of Tor and connect them to the person using it?

Re:Isn't Tor compromised?

[Captain Hook]

Tor's weakness is when one organisation, such as the NSA, controls a large percentage of the exit nodes.

The larger percentage of the exit nodes a single organisation controls the better chance they have to seeing all the packets from any given user.

Becoming an Internet standard would dramatically increase the number of exit nodes making it harder for a single entity to control a decent proportion of them, although the basic attack would still work with enough resources.

Re:Isn't Tor compromised?

[Chrisq]

Wasn't there an article here earlier about how it's not so difficult as earlier imagined to track inputs and output of Tor and connect them to the person using it?

I think that this type of traffic analysis becomes harder as more people use it. The other weakness is if someone controls a large number of exit nodes - if routesr etc all could act as exit nodes it would be safer .... unless someone had a backdoor into the routers!!!

Re:Isn't Tor compromised?

[AHuxley]

If your the NSA or GCHQ every packet into and out of a country belongs to the gov for that ~"day". e.g. your message can go from the UK "around" the world a few times and back into the UK.
The GCHQ gets your entry IP, the message and your destination IP.

Re:Isn't Tor compromised?

[Thor Ablestar]

A single compromised exit node is enough to breach the anonymity of the user. After this, everything that he writes under a nickname can be attributed to him.

Re: Isn't Tor compromised?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would also defeat the main purpose of Tor, which is to access the Web anoynmously.

If you want to build a separate anonymous network on the top the Internet, why would you use Tor and not technology that has been developed with that purpose in mind such as I2P, Freenet or Gnunet?

Re:Isn't Tor compromised?

[fa2k]

Owning exit nodes is not sufficient to reveal the identity of tor users. Owning a large percentage of relay nodes AND exit nodes could compromise the anonymity, as one could just follow the progression of any data throughout the network. If the traffic volume is small enough to be able to statistically separate the streams from various users, it may be sufficient to surveil relay and exit nodes, instead of actually owning the hardware.

There are limitations: the exit node can mess with the data at will, in both directions, and this is how the FBI owned the visitors to a pedo site. They injected some HTML (I'm not positive that it was HTML/JS, but one would assume) to make the browsers of the users connect to FBI servers outside of Tor. It was a bug in firefox that allowed this.

There are two strategies to protect against this,
1) Encrypt everything; only access SSL sites over Tor. This works in theory because the exit node can no longer mess with the data stream. The only way to reliably use this strategy is to *block* non-SSL traffic. There are so many websites with mixed content, which may pull images and ads from non-SSL streams. Also, NSA may be able to break SSL either by a proper MITM attack (completely hypothetical, no evidence exists) or by owning private keys for some CAs.

2) Block any non-tor access from the system used to access Tor. This is possible at the network level with extra hardware, VMs and possibly with SELinux. If the browser *cannot* communicate over the standard internet, only Tor, then one is moderately safe. It's still important to configure the browser to not send identifiable information for fingerprinting and tracking cookies.

By doing 1 and 2 one is quite safe. It may be fine to use a less safe setup for non-secret stuff, like checking facebook, and contributing to flood the tor network with un-interesting traffic. If the "really anonymous" mode required restarting Tor, the NSA would be able to see this from ISP logs, of course.

Re:Isn't Tor compromised?

[Splab]

You really should read up on technologies before making statements like that.

The Pedo busts were not attacking exit nodes, it was an attack on the hidden services within the network, there is no mim attack on hidden services, as no one knows who is talking to who. What the FBI did was compromising the servers hosting the material, serving malware that send a single request out outside the TOR network.

Regarding 2; this only works if your software is perfect, which it won't be. The Pedo bust was abusing a known bug in Firefox 17, which had been fixed for quite a long time, it only takes a single bug in the stack to inject some data, that can be collected at some point later - Even if you only allow data through TOR and using SSL, there is nothing preventing FBI sending enough data about your local network, to help identifying you. (For instance, a quick wifi-scan gives you enough information to place my system somewhere in Denmark, using WIFI databases, like the stuff google collected with street view, you can probably pinpoint it even further)

While forcing SSL is a nice idea, generally, it wont work; as you said, people are doing mixed content - on top of that, it only takes a single compromised request to a CDN like jQuery, to have your system thoroughly compromised, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCNZJ_7f0Hk (While they are compromising anonymous proxies, the attack will work just as well on TOR)

Re:Isn't Tor compromised?

[fa2k]

You're right about the first point, it was a hidden service which FBI took control over, sorry I completely forgot and should have checked. Hidden serivces seem to have SSL-like protection built-in, thanks to the encryption of Tor, but when the FBI controls the server that's of course moot. That's also a different threat model than I thought of before, so bad example.

I still believe it's possible to be safe, but may have underestimated the risks before. The best way seems to be to use VMs or clean installations like booting from CD. There is then a separate computer for the Tor client, blocking anything but the Tor HTTP proxy with a firewall on the interface connected to the client. The client shouldn;'t have any unique software or hardware (as malware can enumerate USB, PCI devices, display resolution, etc), so the best is to use a VM. Also the MAC addresses of the gateway and the client must be randomised frequently, and the client must of course not have access to other communication devices like WiFi and bluetooth, and webcams. (don't know audio / microphone). The client would ideally have no persistent storage (one more point in favour of VMs, real hardware has a bunch of firmwares). The link seems interesting, actually talks about Tor, will have a look

Re:Isn't Tor compromised?

[fa2k]

Some corrections are in order, hope I caught all my mistakes now..

Hidden serivces seem to have SSL-like protection built-in, thanks to the encryption of Tor,

Probably not, that was made up. there is encryption, but I don't see how they could have authentication (unless the certificate was in the *.onion name, but they're not that long)

The best way seems to be to use VMs or clean installations like booting from CD. There is then a separate computer for the Tor client, blocking anything but the Tor HTTP proxy with a firewall on the interface connected to the client.

To clarify, client & gateway be connected directly, no others computers including no internet

The client shouldn;'t have any unique software

..including language & keyboard layout

(don't know [about blocking] audio / microphone).

OF course block mic. Not only can the malware *hear you speaking*, the mic probably also has a unique noise spectrum, and there may even be outside noises like trains. Speakers probably OK, but could relay information via high frequency signals to other compromised local computers

Re:Isn't Tor compromised?

[Splab]

Sorry, but I don't think you understand how TOR hidden services work (to be fair, Wikipedia is downright useless here) :-)

https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en - they do a much better introduction than I could ever hope to do ;)

Re: Isn't Tor compromised?

[Burz]

It would also defeat the main purpose of Tor, which is to access the Web anoynmously.

If you want to build a separate anonymous network on the top the Internet, why would you use Tor and not technology that has been developed with that purpose in mind such as I2P, Freenet or Gnunet?

Because the people involved are hurriedly grasping at concepts that they hadn't thought worthwhile just a year ago. Naturally, they gravitate toward brands that have cache and repurpose them as meaningless buzzwords in an effort to stay relevant.

Without large institutional and government support, Tor would buckle under the load of general-purpose internetworking. You need a P2P version of it essentially, which would be I2P, so that the lions' share of participants contribute bandwidth back to the network while creating much better defence against traffic analysis.

Tor has also been foolhardy in ignoring advances in computer hardware, and kept on using 1024bit keys until it was way too late. Now the NSA has many years worth of weakly-encrypted traffic stored where they can go fishin' for people they don't like (albeit, with a great amount of effort for the time being).

As to the subject of TFA, check out my post from Sunday. ;)

Re:Isn't Tor compromised?

[dbIII]

1) Encrypt everything; only access SSL sites over Tor

Those stupid "web accelerator" boxes that proxy https so internally have everything as if it is plain text are presumably the NSA or similar's way to deal with that - at least they are a big fat target for criminals looking for banking passwords. The inconvenience of having all SSL traffic going via those flagged as a man in the middle attack (which is accurate) means that users click to use the certs and anyone that has a way in to those devices can see it as if it was any other traffic. Even if the vendor has no remote back door (didn't Snowden have something to say about that for some vendors?) the owner of the device has a front door, so the site or ISP admin can watch all the traffic as if it's not encrypted if the user has accepted the cert.
Those things are not everywhere yet but they are creeping in. Please do not misunderstand - I think a normal web proxy is a good idea but strongly believe that only the two end points should be involved in the exchange of SSL information. Anything that gets into the middle with the excuse of trying to speed up transmission of the bank passwords or whatever you don't want others to see should sod off.

Getting this past the censors?

[Jamlad]

But how else then shall they keep us safe from all the Bad Guys, ne'er-do-wells, pedophiles, terrorists, communists, liberals, hippies, criminals, foreigners, pirates, gays, racists, misogynists, thought crimes, neighbors, and YOU?

Re:Getting this past the censors?

[dmbasso]

Cold fjord, is that you?

TOR? Or I2P? Or Freenet? Or something else?

[coder111]

Hmm, TOR is a nice project and all, but it has its benefits and drawbacks. I think IETF need to give quite a bit of thought before adopting some technology as a standard.

I'm all for anonymous communication with encryption though. I hate what corporations and governments are doing to the internet. I do believe internet is the most important human discovery since fire, and its freedoms need to be preserved...

--Coder

Re:TOR? Or I2P? Or Freenet? Or something else?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know that I'd consider the internet a "discovery". More of an invention. A discovery is like finding a new species of animal that's existed for a long time, but we didn't know it was there.

Re:TOR? Or I2P? Or Freenet? Or something else?

[Lennie]

If something would happen at the IETF, mostly likely out come would be if the IETF would create a work group to create a protocol, maybe based on one of those existing protocols. Just like HTTP/2.0 is based on SPDY, but isn't SPDY.

Re:TOR? Or I2P? Or Freenet? Or something else?

[Joce640k]

Hmm, TOR is a nice project and all, but it has its benefits and drawbacks. I think IETF need to give quite a bit of thought before adopting some technology as a standard.
--Coder

Even if they do, the NSA will make sure it never gets built into a major OS or anything that people can download/use simply.

I've always suspected the reason why Outlook (or whatever) doesn't have encryption enabled by default was because of visits from the men in black SUVs.

After the last couple of months I'm 99.999999% sure it's true.

Re:Tor

[Anonymous Coward]

Sources please?

I wonder how long

[skovnymfe]

until someone simply creates an STCP/SUDP/SIP standard where the first thing any newly established connection does is negotiate SSH-style encryption (fuck TLS), with fallback to regular TCP. Can't be that hard, can it?

Re: I wonder how long

[mattpalmer1086]

Go for it.

Don't worry - you won't get anywhere close, but I guarantee you will learn a lot.

Start by trying to define what you are protecting from whom, and how two arbitrary endpoints who have never met can know they are talking to each other and not a man in the middle.

Re: I wonder how long

[Joce640k]

how two arbitrary endpoints who have never met can know they are talking to each other and not a man in the middle.

My take on this is that the messenger apps should permanently show a fingerprint of the encryption key on screen (eg. at the bottom of the window).

If the key is easily visible then people would be able to compare keys when they meet in real life. Any mass tampering by the NSA would then be obvious and provable. You can also compare keys in other ways, eg. in a voice call.

It doesn't prevent man in the middle attacks but it makes it impossible to do in secret.

Re:This is people mistaking "want" with "will"

[d33tah]

I'm under the impression that you're confusing things. Noone said that you'd be forced to run an exit node, or even a relay. I believe it's just about making the protocol a standard.

void between chair and keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

*OMG* no! Tor does nothing if you want to spill your personal guts all over the internet. Also cookies and other nefarious tracking technologies work
wonderfully right through tor. tor doesn't block you if you want to scream your name and credit card number and whatnot to the internet ...
can we just have websites work without javascript and FLASH?!

Re:void between chair and keyboard

[AmiMoJo]

I don't think anyone said it was a silver bullet, just a part of the solution.

There comes a time when splits are required.

[Anonymous Coward]

How feasible would it be to split the internet right down the middle but share the same lines?

So on one half you could keep the wild wild west net and on the other all the cry babies and censor-happy types can have their walled wide web.
Then just onion-up the wild wild west side.

Re:There comes a time when splits are required.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, I realized a bit of a misunderstanding in my own post that could lead to confusion.
Note that I do mean the internet when I refer to wild wild west and walled wide web, those were just metaphors for the web being the most commonly used services for the standard user.

I'd personally love for such a thing to happen because it would essentially finally emulate the real world.
At the moment it is just a horrific mess of services mashed together with broken censorship all around.

The walled wide web would be great for kids while the wild wild west would be great for those that aren't stuck in the 1500sBCE, or kids.

Re:There comes a time when splits are required.

[FireFury03]

How feasible would it be to split the internet right down the middle but share the same lines?

So on one half you could keep the wild wild west net and on the other all the cry babies and censor-happy types can have their walled wide web.
Then just onion-up the wild wild west side.

This wouldn't work because you're forgetting the censor-happy people's mentality: they aren't trying to censor the internet so that they can't get to certain material, they are trying to censor it so that _you_ can't get to certain material because the _idea_ of you looking at certain stuff in private offends them. So this kind of split couldn't happen because the censor-happy people still don't want to allow you to get to the "wild wild west" net.

Wide-scale censoring is all about "I find what you do in private to be offensive so you should be locked up for offending me!" and almost never to do with "I find this content offensive so don't want to see it myself". Much the same way as various activities happening between consenting adults in private are illegal - this isn't about protecting anyone from anything other than offense caused by their own narrow-mindedness.

Note, I do think there is a place for local-scale censorship, such as preventing kids/teachers at school from accidentally stumbling across stuff they shouldn't. However, where kids are *actively* trying to get at porn, et-al, censorship is never going to work and it is far better to spot kids doing this so someone can have a talk with them. That's not to say that I necessarilly think kids looking at porn is a bad thing (indeed, it's completely normal), but talking to them about it to put it into context is probably a good plan.

Re:There comes a time when splits are required.

[SuricouRaven]

"However, where kids are *actively* trying to get at porn, et-al, censorship is never going to work"

I work at a school. You are quite correct. If they want to find something enough, they will find a way.

Re:There comes a time when splits are required.

[Jason Levine]

And the best thing about "local-scale censorship" is you get to decide what to censor. If you happen to think that the human body is fine to be viewed but violence is horrible, then you can ban violent sites and allow sites that show humans sans clothing. If you think that certain combinations of adult humans are abhorrent, you can block that from being viewed by you (or anyone else in your house). And so on. Meanwhile, other people with other ideas of what is fine to view and what isn't will view (or block) their own sites without affecting you.

If the censor-happy people really just didn't want to see the stuff that offends them, they'd install NetNanny (or a similar program) and be done. Instead, like you said, the mere existence of what offends them is what gets them upset. They don't care if you need to type in an address, confirm your age, sign up for an account using a credit card, pay a $10 monthly fee, and THEN get to see the offending content. The fact that a path exists to the content at all is horrible and MUST be stopped at all costs. Usually because they imagine a child innocently stumbling along the path - no matter how unlikely - and seeing the content. ("Then little Johnny mashed his fingers on the keyboard and just happened to enter our Discover Card number and expiration date.... If only the site was banned, he wouldn't have seen those nekkid women!")

Re:There comes a time when splits are required.

[nurb432]

It's already been done. Its called 'FreeNet'.

Re:This is people mistaking "want" with "will"

[CreatureComfort]

But the extension, as mentioned in the summary, would be to bake it into internet appliances, such as routers and modems, that would automatically connect via TOR, without user intervention. Now I'm sure that if you are a savvy user and used to going into your router settings to tweak things, there will be a check box to remove TOR default functionality, but most folks will just wonder and complain about how much slower their connection is with the new internet box thingy.

Re:IETF, please use better tech

[SuricouRaven]

TOR on such wide usage would cripple the internet with the load. What is needed is some sort of anonymous decentralised content-addressible database to handle the bulk data distribution.

ie, Freenet.

Re:Tor

[weilawei]

Not quite. Perhaps they had influence, but, from the mouth of the horse itself: "Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory."

Re:This is people mistaking "want" with "will"

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority of internet do not want TOR baked into their internet enabled devices.

The vast majority of internet do not want to have their every online action stored indefinitely, cataloged, profiled, and sold to the highest bidder. All it takes is a couple of interested and motivated parties.

Re:Tor

[AHuxley]

Think of it as a tool to let NGO's and US backed 'classic' color revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution take hold and spread as web 2.0 was emerging.
After the Snowden news about total mastery of the 'internet' it all too late for US and UK use now.

Re:True or False

[jellomizer]

True,
Group think is the Opposite of Synergy.
Well it is the opposite outcome.

Unlike most people I actually know what Synergy means, and see how it is greatly misused.
Synergy is the process where a group of people working on a problem come up with a solution which is greater then the sum of what any individual could make.
Group Think is where the a group of people working on a problem come up with a solution which is less then the sum of what any individual could make.

Obtaining Synergy in an environment is very hard to achieve, because you need to make sure you don't have strong personalities trying pushing bad ideas thew their own force of will, or intimating position. People getting tired out from the process and settling on lesser ideas, reserved personalities not giving their ideas, and a slew of other things going on as well.

Group think is what usually comes out of these events, where the strongly supported stupid idea is forced down the thought, with issues not properly evaluated, and blank assumptions made.

Re:Why the hell would you trust Tor?

[AHuxley]

Yes this was well understood in 1997 and still seems to be 'news' to many. You have many 'well' funded exit nodes in interesting locations.
"Low-Resource Routing Attacks Against Anonymous Systems" pdf:
http://digitool.library.colostate.edu/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=168113

Re:This is people mistaking "want" with "will"

[JeffOwl]

Is that why so many of them use Facebook and Google services? It is possible that they don't "want" it, but if they don't care enough to stop using Facebook and Google then what makes you think they would want to use Tor? Also, people doing lots of legit downloading don't want anything that negatively impacts download speeds and gamers don't want anything that impacts latency and couldn't give a rats ass about the government knowing that they play BF4..

Re:This is people mistaking "want" with "will"

[phayes]

Riiiiight and pushing TOR to be an "internet standard" is not people wanting it to be baked into devices like Teredo has been in in windows since Vista...

Tor is NOT secure

[nctritech]

There are so many ways that browsers and other software that communicates via the Internet give up the identity of the user. Tor can't stop any of them, and they explicitly say so. I'm working on designing a new protocol and the software to run it that anonymizes communications better, and I had to eliminate the chance that existing software could tunnel through it because of this. Any software that tunnels communication which isn't secure will automatically be a major security risk. Even turning off JavaScript and Flash and Java don't help; see the NSA's use of exploits against Tor browser bundle security flaws to ID users for why not.

Re:Tor

[gmuslera]

If Tor were closed source you could had some reason. But the NSA hates to put their access codes in plain sight, and that it is open source, with everyone using/implementing it free to inspect and check if there is any vulnerability in its design makes pretty hard that it be compromised at that level, no matter who developed it.

I hope Tor runs away as fast as it can

[pedantic bore]

I've worked with the IETF on several RFCs. I'm also familiar with the challenges that the Tor project faces daily, and what they have to do to stay ahead of the entities trying to break Tor. I think for Tor to even stop to talk to the IETF would be an waste of their time; Tor needs to be nimble, and the IETF standards process is painfully, horribly slow and unable to move quickly on anything. Given that Tor releases updates on a cycle that is shorter than the normal time a draft spends in the AD review queue, by the time an RFC got to the standards track it would already be out-of-date.

Content addressible, please!

[SuricouRaven]

All these anonymous routing techniques place a lot of load on the internet and a great deal of latency. I have a proposal to help:

A content-addressible distributed store for static content. You can make it work like Freenet if you really want to be paranoid, but that isn't needed. Just a distributed caching system indexed by, say, sha256 hash.

It'd take some minor revisions to web browsers, but you can make this work with backwards compatibility by using a reserved word in a URL. Eg, http://theserver.com/magicword/sha256/hash/mime/mime/filename.jpg. A non-compatible browser would simply treat it as a plain file request and get it as normal, while those supporting the protocol instead recognise the /magicword/sha256/ part. Longer term, once the infrastructure is in place, switching to magnet links would offer some significant advantages like the ability to specify multible hashes, size, etc.

Clients can then contact any convenient cache server (The source, ISP run caches, ones built into routers found by service discovery, other clients on the same segment) to obtain the desired file.

This address-by-hash approach has some major advantages in efficiency which would make anonymous routing and physical mesh networking much more viable.
- Improved caching proxy performance: No more messing around with IMS requests. The hash defines the only correct response, and it doesn't expire. Ever. Think of the potential for how much better multi-user caches can work under those conditions. The first person views a viral video, and no-one else has to wait for it to download over the WAN. Great on moving vehicles, too: A train's cache can load up the day's iPlayer etc video in the morning and commuters can enjoy a high-performance cache rather than struggle with mobile access.
- Improved resistance to takedowns: You can take down the site that first hosted content, but so long as the hash for that video is being passed around it'll be near-impossible to eliminate it from every caching node. It's also a lot easier to find new hosting for a few kilobytes of HTML than a twenty-meg video that half the country wants to see at once.
- Reduced latency and improved performance by moving the content closer to the destination: It'd be like a CDN for the masses, except no need to pay a fortune for it.
- Reduced hosting costs: For the same reason. Fewer re-requests for files already seen once, better caching proxy capabilities.
- Improved offline access: Internet access unreliable? By eliminating the need for IMS queries for images, pages can load from cache much more easily. If the HTML is static and addressed via hash, an entire website could be stored that way.

CAN for static content, conventional packet switch for dynamic. I think that's a good way to go. Different types of traffic that need to be handled in completly different ways.

Re:Tor

[MoreThanThen]

just take a leak and whistle dixie

torproject should sell tor routers/phones/desktops

[keneng]

Tor project should sell tor applicances in every shape. routers, phones, desktops, laptops. Lots of phones/routers have GNU/Linux customizeable firmware. Nobody has taken upon themselves to offer up turn-key solutions/support for these.
Jolla Phone, Mozilla Firefox OS phone, Cyanogenmod?, Iphone, Ubuntu Phone.

You could configure it with tor DIY as you would your desktop, but for your grandma that doesn't cut the mustard.
That's why a turn-key service-offering like that would be best.
That would be something worth selling in little mall kiosks across the country.
To give you an idea how much people crave for something like this, the bitcoin(anonymity-related) Robocoin kiosk in Vancouver is a success in its first month.

Here is how I think things should work:
1)You could pay torproject a fee and send them your SIM/phone/ADSL-VDSL-CABLEMODEM router.
2)torproject does what needs to be done. i.e. flash the phone, flash the router, and automagically configure for customer to target isp/phone provider.
3)torproject sends you the appliance ready to go.

If you don't have a phone/router, it would be best to ask for recommendations from torproject what hardware can best support your digital freedoms and privacy.
At present, I prefer the specs and digital freedom of the Google Nexus 4. Ubuntu Phone, Android, Cyanogen, Replicant, FireFox OS can run on it. Iphone can be jailbroken, but the point here is to buy hardware that supports digital freedom from the get-go. Google sells all its NEXUS phones UNLOCKED as it should be and that's why I recommend the NEXUS 4 because they are well-known in the developer community. The NEXUS 5 is a beautiful phone, but at present it's hard to find other firmwares running it on it apart from Android. That's a bug and not a feature with respect to Digital Freedom and Digital Privacy. The consumer deserves the right of choice of OS on their hardware applicance be it phone, computer, router, fridge, coffee-maker whatever.

The IETF could put TOR in the plumbing, but it's not going to happen. It's not politically correct in some countries and that's why it's not going to fly that way. It has to be through some hardware manufacturers and let the consumers purchase it. CONSUMERS have all the purchasing power.
All we have to do is market digital freedom and digital privacy hardware and ensure it comes with a turn-key tor solution in it.
Torproject should be the ones providing that and receive some kind of fee for it.
Tails CD was close, but it has bugs and doesn't work behind routers. That's why torproject router/phone firmware would be important to have.

My engineer's brain hurts

[CurryCamel]

The shortest path between two points would not be a straight line, but it would go around three sides, twice.
Can't we all just get a long so we wouldn't need this sort of nonsense. *sigh*

Re:My engineer's brain hurts

[jones_supa]

I feel ya. Possibly a saner and still effective system would be to simply enforce end-to-end encryption in all communications.

NSA: TOR Stinks, TOR developers smile

[Press2ToContinue]

Snowden leaked NSA opinion on TOR here:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/04/tor-stinks-nsa-presentation-document

Slashdot reporting here:
http://slashdot.org/story/13/10/04/162254/how-the-nsa-targets-tor

Who wants to pay for it?

[Cajun Hell]

One thing you've gotta admit about Tor, is that it's an inefficient way to get packets from point A to point B. If we had Tor built into the all Internet protocols, don't you think one of the first things you would do, would be to look at some case where you didn't like the performance you were getting, and then you'd "invent" a shiny new protocol that directly links two points, providing massive performance improvements at the cost of making traffic analysis easier? And don't you think there are shitloads of applications, where that tradeoff would make sense? Inventing not-Tor would be the biggest thing, ever.

Crypto is good. Modern CPUs can handle it effortlessly, nearly for "free." There are some cases (e.g. shared caches) where you might not want the tradeoff, but overall it's turning out to be a no-brainer, almost always worth the compromise. You just can't say that about onion routing, though. It's subjectively good, at best.

BTW, also: here in America, a lot of us have asymmetric connections for the "last mile."

Re:Wrong approach...

[dcollins117]

The solution to world peace is simple - no one likes war, so all we need to do is get everyone to agree not to fight one another. Problem solved.

How about we address the reasons we need to hide who we talk to instead of finding new and creative ways to hide? Why are we trying to find technical solutions to social issues?

It's the best we can do. We're engineers, not omnipotent beings.

Bandwidth/Risk

[nurb432]

And since a lot of us now live under bandwidth limitations, who would want to run an exit node?

That doesn't even address the potential for the feds to arrive at your door due to some moron out there trying to browse kiddie pron that happens to come out thru your node..

Unless we had 'protected' entities with enough bandwidth handling all the exits to the 'open net', then the concept of making this 'the standard' is flawed.

( freenet has a similar issue with bandwidth use.. who can afford to contribute what is needed? )

Tor and /. just don't mix

[BozoForPresident]

On the topic of Tor use... Viewing /. through the Tor browser bundle sucks. It's the goddamn autorefresh feature. Go stick a tube down someone else's throat - if I want my goddamned page updated, I'll do it myself. When it happens on auto, i get what I'm looking at whipped away from me, then it takes a while to reload and render and jerks my damn page position around or just sends me to the pink-page-of-untrusted-ip-address-shame. Autorefresh sucks, m-kay?

In an unrelated story

[TheRecklessWanderer]

In an unrelated story US Government Officials today announced the seizure of large amounts of heroine cocaine and guns at the house of all the guys names mentioned in the article. Government spokesmen said today "Definitely not planted. Definitely not planted. We are excellent drivers". All above mentioned persons have been placed in a prison of our choosing and will be arraigned to answer their charges in 16 to 24 years.