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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.
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??
That coming on the heels of the decentralized web solution coming from BitTorrent, Inc.
Pretty exciting times.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Mod parent up! Whoever modded this comment down either hasn't investigated the matter, or sympathizes with those whose goal is the total destruction of privacy for average citizens.
I'm pretty sure at this point that Taco Cowboy's posts start off at -1 due to his reputation score.
In regards to his claims, the Tor software is open source and you can look at it yourself if you want to look for any backdoors. Put simply, in order to 'compromise' the network an attacker needs to control a significant number of Nodes, or have some method of forcing traffic to use nodes they control. These are known weaknesses and are published by the Tor Project. IF a 3 letter agency really was behind the whole thing, they wouldn't tell people any of that, and they would already control the Directory Servers themselves so that they could manipulate the network behavior.
tl;dr - Taco Cowboy is a resident nutter who likes to talk a lot of shit with nothing to back it up.