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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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: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: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.

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: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)