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Tor Network May Be Attacked, Says Project Leader
Earthquake Retrofit writes The Register is reporting that the Tor Project has warned that its network – used to mask peoples' identities on the internet – may be knocked offline in the coming days. In a Tor blog post, project leader Roger 'arma' Dingledine said an unnamed group may seize Tor's directory authority servers before the end of next week. These servers distribute the official lists of relays in the network, which are the systems that route users' traffic around the world to obfuscate their internet connections' public IP addresses.
gets*
Long time Tor user, and was never aware of these 9 directory servers. This seems like an extremely weak link in the chain, esp. since 6 of these servers are in the US.
The Tor project promotes running relays, etc., but never a specific DS. Is this something the standard Tor client can do? Can anyone setup a Tor DS? Why has this never really been talked about until now??
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Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I'm not really sure I understand why people use Tor. Its aim seems to be to make tracing Internet usage a little harder, but it's pretty much safe to assume that governments are running a significant proportion of the nodes, and traffic analysis can determine the rest. Stupid design decisions like having a single point of failure in the form of a centrally maintained list of nodes suggest that the whole thing had an expiry date waiting to be announced.
I don't think the FBI would give a shit about Tor. If they want to find your identity bad enough, they'll do so via extralegal means, mainly because they can. See the ongoing silk road case, where the DOJ has yet to show how exactly they physically identified its owner and its server locations.
The only organizations powerful enough with enough motive to take out Tor would have to be either Russia or China. China especially because Tor is perhaps the biggest means of circumventing the GFW, and unlike the FBI, China doesn't have either physical influence or physical presence in any of Tor's geographical nerve centers. (And yes, in spite of the distributed nature of Tor, I did correctly use the word center.)
In the future, this sounds like a perfect job for a decentralised dictionary such as Namecoin. Perhaps if the Namecoin project continues to grow and mature then it can be considered as a fallback and warning system should something happen to Tor's directory authority servers.
There is no such agency that share these initials.
When I got r00ted by Sony from a Brittany Spears CD, the FBI was nowhere to be found, but when Sony was r00ted, the FBI is all up in that junk?
I said group, you said agency.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Nah, probably the PRK at it again..
yes. No such agency that has compromised Tor already.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
99% of Tor servers are owned US government. Tor is already broken.
I thought it was their project.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
you don't know that. I don't know for certain that it has. Only they know for sure, and they're not about to tell. When they claim to have information that could only be gained by compromising the network or through seizure of the hardware, then we'll know.
Lesson for today: if you don't want information to end up in the hands of those who you don't want having it, airgap it. DO NOT expose it to a network. Whatever you post on a public network, on whatever forum using whatever protocol or encryption or other obfuscation, becomes as far as you should be concerned, information that is now forever and irreversibly in the public domain for any and all to use for whatever nefarious reason.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
no, but they did use just 35 lines of code to compromise it in 2012, during the Operation Torpedo dragnet in which they managed to identify arrest and charge 25 US citizens on their IP addresses* and an undisclosed number of foreigners overseas on international arrest warrants (and slightly less legal means) on child sexual exploitation.
*I don't have the link handy, but I do seem to remember a bunch of John Doe claims by the **AA (or maybe it was the BPI) being thrown out because the respondents were identified by their IPv4 addresses.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
So damn the torpedos! Full SPEED Ahead!
You sunk!
That coming on the heels of the decentralized web solution coming from BitTorrent, Inc.
Pretty exciting times.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
One of the articles mentions a disgruntled employee against whom a hit had been taken out. Want to bet he ran to the feds because he was scared and ratted on the silk road. I don't attribute any mystical hacking of TOR to the FBI, someone came forward and spilled the beans. The reason the FBI are keeping it quiet is that in this way it seems that the FBI can track you regardless of what you are doing. If they are planning on taking out the main TOR network it's for the precise reason that they CAN'T track you through it, and so taking it out is the only other option. So let's assume they DDOS the TOR directory authorities, if I DDOS'ed someone it would be a criminal offense. Why can they do it without being criminally charged? Also whoever thinks TOR is the "biggest means of circumventing the GFW" is an idiot. You would get much better speed by simply using a credit card to rent a $30 a year vps server in the states and installing squid. Firewall circumvented. Hell, there a plenty of free proxies out there which will allow you to do the same thing. The GFW is a joke, and only stops the ignorant.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Why is the Sony music CD rootkit a civil matter while rooting of Sony is a criminal matter attracting the attention of the FBI?
TOR is a HONEY POT that enjoys a successful deployment beyond anyone's expectation !
It is not China nor Russia who came up with TOR, it was Uncle Sam which is the entity who funded the TOR project
TOR has several uses for USA ---
1. As you mentioned, to offer dissents within Russia / China or any other dictatorial nation a way to sneak out of the watchful eyes of their respective ruling regime
2. TOR also offers a false sense of security to those who wanted to do something not-so-legal, and in that way, "fish" them out from the real DARK NET and land them inside TOR while Uncle Sam gets to watch their every single fucking move
The highlighted quote above in itself has explained all --- that Uncle Sam knows everything that happens within the TOR domains, including the identity of those involved
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
About 250 years ago the British army was fighting the French and their allies, the American Indians
The commanding officer thought up a very ingenious way to wipe out the French's allies by introducing smallpox to the American Indians, and he did it by seemingly by being kind to the American Indians --- he gave the Indians blankets
Of course he did not tell the American Indians that those blankets were used by people who were infected with smallpox
As a result of the biological warfare, untold number of the American Indians who fought alongside the French died
Now, back to 2014/2015
TOR seemingly offers the world a "security blanket", a "blanket" which would, by its reputation, ought to have give protection to the users from the authority's prying eyes
But like the blankets of yore, TOR came with "extra bonus" ... bonus in which will allow the authority to not only track the users, but also know everything that the users did
The TOR infrastructure is filled with many weak links, weak links which can be, and are being, exploited by Uncle Sam
No matter if it's NSA or FBI or CIA or whatever three-alphabetic agency, TOR will reveal to them whatever they want to know
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Group means a gathering for self interest. Agency implies they have government, and implicitly country, approval. In his defense, it's hard to tell the difference these days.
no, but they did use just 35 lines of code to compromise it
1. Saying "35 lines of code" means nothing at all. I've seen massively complex programs shoe-horned into a few dozen "lines of code".
2. The code in question was not part of Tor, it was malicious code placed onto a web server which they had located and compromised. It used Flash or Javascript (I don't recall which off-hand) and when the browser ran the code, it simply opened a direct connection to a LE-controlled server, thus revealing the real IP that person was using. Anybody who ran script/flash blocking plugins (or simply didn't have them installed) was immune, as their browser simply did not execute the malicious code.
Major takedown of sites by *** agencies - they did traffic analysis attack and hacked poorly set up Tor servers, if I recall.
1. citations required.
2. it was a Flash exploit.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
The burning stuff seems to be quite pupular... amongst many.
Is this related to the Sony Hackers?
If N.Korea used Tor to attack Sony, then U.S. will shutdown Tor. Easy as pie.
So allegedly the rumor is that the FBI is taking down part of the network to try and somehow catch and/or prove the North Koreans were behind the hack on Sony. I don't know how true that is. Seems like it wouldn't matter if we had proof or not. That puffy doughboy piece of shit running North Korea is a perpetual liar and we can't possibly like him less nor with the US do anything about it in either case.
As much as what Snowden wants to share with us we must understand that Snowden does not know everything
As much secretive files that Snowden has collected, we must realize that there are still files that are out of reach of Snowden
The government of the United States of America has a vast network of operatives, and many of those are operating under strict compartmentalized structure - and many of those cells simply do not share their operational detail with others
I have it on good authority that the FBI give plenty of shits about Tor.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
It's easy to have tons of sockpuppets that "kowtow to the party line" here on /., and then to use the modpoints gained on each sockpuppet to trash *anyone's* so-called "reputation" score here. Think TOR is a fucked up system? The one here is JUST AS BAD, if not worse. Ever wonder WHY they won't let you see who downmodded you here? That IS why! It speaks worlds of those who designed and run this place: They are, to put it bluntly, little hit and run sneaks and punks, no better than any TOR "criminal", which this "feature" of their forums ware blatantly exposes for that very reason. When you write software, parts of you yourself are exposed in it. Remember that.