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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.
well, yes, because the directory servers have a realtime index of active exit nodes. They hold no actual content, but what they do hold is really not very much in the way of payload (would probably fill a floppy disk); the killer is in the number of concurrent interrogations and the prerequisite bandwidth which would put it out of reach of an individual. All you'd need to do to bring the network to its knees is locate each directory server by IP, find a DOS vulnerability and exploit it. Same for any network with any sort of active directory service.
(knowing this because I built a distributed database that was vulnerable to precisely one thing: the loss (even momentarily) of the directory server. Killed it dead, and rebuilding/resynching it was a fucking nightmare. Having a failover for that one service would've saved a LOT of headaches but I'd already killed my budget).
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
You could be right, but given TOR's design, it doesn't even matter if the feds wrote it, they still couldn't figure out your identity. The feds would have to own all the nodes in the network, which is possible... but if they did own all the nodes, it wouldn't really matter if they wrote it or not now would it?
All that said... there are easier ways to hide your identity on the internet.