Academics Build a New Tor Client Designed To Beat the NSA

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 21, 2015 @07:50AM 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.

2 of 63 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Bad headline by OverlordQ · 2015-05-21 07:56 · 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.
Re:written by the NSA by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-21 08:02 · 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.