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Academics Build a New Tor Client Designed To Beat the NSA

Posted by timothy on from the non-spy-vs-spy dept.

An anonymous reader writes: In response to a slew of new research about network-level attacks against Tor, academics from the U.S. and Israel built a new Tor client called Astoria designed to beat adversaries like the NSA, GCHQ, or Chinese intelligence who can monitor a user's Tor traffic from entry to exit. Astoria differs most significantly from Tor's default client in how it selects the circuits that connect a user to the network and then to the outside Internet. The tool is an algorithm designed to more accurately predict attacks and then securely select relays that mitigate timing attack opportunities for top-tier adversaries.

7 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. So where is the source code? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    no source code == no story

  2. written by the NSA by MooseTick · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If the NSA were going to create a TOR substitute, wouldn't this be how they would want to describe it?

    --
    Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
    1. Re:written by the NSA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      TOR was originally developed by the Navy to hide CIA and NSA traffic. It was released to the public specifically to allow everybody's lesser-importance traffic to provide cover for said spies.

  3. Bad headline by OverlordQ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Should be 'Academics hypothesize better tor client', since all they're giving out is their analysis and not sourcecode there's no way to verify their claims.

    --
    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
  4. mod parent up! by Presto+Vivace · · Score: 3, Informative

    Almost everyone involved in developing Tor was (or is) funded by the US government

  5. Not foolproof by dmaul99 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Just remember: if somebody is interested in finding out what you are doing, and they have unlimited resources to do so, then you WILL get caught no matter how good you think your tools are, no matter how careful you think you are.

    1. Re: Not foolproof by BaronAaron · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Luckily there is no such thing as infinite resources.