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MIT Creates Tor Alternative That Floods Networks With Fake Data (softpedia.com)

Posted by timothy on from the can't-we-just-use-trolls? dept.

An anonymous reader writes with word that MIT researchers "created an alternative to Tor, a network messaging system called Vuvuzela that pollutes the network with dummy data so the NSA won't know who's talking to who." Initial tests show the systems overhead adding a 44-second delay, but the network can work fine and preserve anonymity even it has more than 50% of servers compromised.

21 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Great, just what we need! by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 4, Insightful

    More wasted bandwidth!

    1. Re:Great, just what we need! by sinij · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Disagree. No cost is too high for protecting our freedoms.

    2. Re:Great, just what we need! by alvinrod · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Which the government could easily spare us of needing if they'd only quit illegally spying on their citizens.

    3. Re:Great, just what we need! by JoeMerchant · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This is actually a method that a (partially) top-secret government installation used back in the 1980s. They have a huge campus, with network covering all of it, but they run really small packet size and keep a healthy quantity of random BS traversing the network at all times, so even before any interceptor can start working on the top-secret encryption, they've got to sort all the chaff packets. Also helps when the academic types get careless with secret info and forget to use the encryption layer, still bloody well impossible to sift the 0.001% interesting traffic out of the garbage when packets are flying around with 1 byte payloads.

    4. Re:Great, just what we need! by leftover · · Score: 2

      You fail high-school civics.

      --
      Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
    5. Re:Great, just what we need! by EmeraldBot · · Score: 2

      > This is actually a method that a (partially) top-secret government installation used back in the 1980s.

      Yeah right. Cool story. Now where is the proof?

      Oh yeah, "partially top-secret."

      Proof that you, Mr. Anon, have no experience with governmental projects. It's rather common to have compartmented access, and for the project to have different parts in varying degrees of secrecy. He doesn't need proof, it's an anecdote, and you're perfectly welcome to throw it away.

      But, this sounds like... Emm... A security technique I could... easily forsee such a place using. It's certainly a good one, if rather stressful on your data lines...

      --
      "Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
    6. Re:Great, just what we need! by ledow · · Score: 2

      Ah, you mean "defeated by any trivial filter".

      Security through obscurity (which is what this is) is doomed to fail. It *can* work, for short periods, when it's unexpected, when people aren't really looking (how many people just have a "secret URL" on their blog to get into the admin interface so that it's not publicly visible - doesn't stop people finding it), etc.

      But anything like this? Pointless. And one academic getting careless with encryption even once would likely see them sacked in such a place.

      It's not at all hard with a brief packet capture to find some common element or even trace a particular conversation of interest in - quite literally - seconds. Hell, I run a small commercial network and we transfer Terabytes over it every single day. Just that sheer volume is more obfuscation than anything else. Have you seen how long it takes to store those kinds of packet captures and apply filters when you're talking dozens of terabytes of data? Nothing to do with crafting them, that's a Wireshark tutorial and ten minutes. But actually applying them needs a lot of data filtering.

      But, still, I call bullshit. They're just playing at it if they are really doing that for that purpose. It would be the work of a moment to immediately alert someone and discard any unencrypted packets on such a network. Generating costly fake traffic that gets in your way, slows things down, and could bollocks up your own data investigations? Pointless.

    7. Re:Great, just what we need! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Back in the early 1990s, when designing a secure network, on the physical side, the guide was to place the cables in conduit that would be positively pressurized, and if the pressure went down in the pipe, all cables would be cut. The mechanism that swung the axe was very sensitive, just to keep someone from attaching something to the pipe, pressurizing the attachment, then cutting in under pressure. The pressure varied as well randomly, so if someone cut in at the wrong pressure, it would also trigger the "cut all links" circuit.

      The same book also stated exactly as the parent -- you had encrypted traffic flowing on the network at all times. Of course, this book was dated -- they preferred ring topologies (ATM... and no, not the teller machine... the network with 53 byte packets) because all the machines on there could cough up a random packet and nobody would be the wiser. With switches, it becomes a bit more tricky to have encryption as noise without making the links unusable due to congestion.

      The ironic thing -- this was a book pitched for basic security for the enterprise, when businesses actually really cared about security.

    8. Re:Great, just what we need! by Visarga · · Score: 2

      I thought about this. How can we send a fragment of a file from node A to B without implicating node B. Both as an uploader or downloader, a rouge MPAA node could implicate the other party. Installing intermediary nodes would only implicate the intermediaries.

      How can we anonymize the data itself? If we use a third node, C, to organize A and B, it could store data in encrypted fragments on various nodes and put the keys on different nodes, then instruct a downloader from where to get all the pieces. That way no node is choosing what to seed, they would just download a number of encrypted packets they know nothing about and serve them on demand.

      But the downloader could still tell where it got its data from. So we need to make it such that unrelated fragments are also included in the decoding process to create confusion. That way, it would be hard to know which fragments are really from the desired file and which are just extra fragments that are there just for show. It could be made in such a way that all the data the node has stored (including those anonymous encrypted fragments) are included in the decoding process in a way. So now the downloader can only assume that all the network is to blame or no-one is more blameworthy than anyone else. Of course the network should carry enough legal content to make it legit, otherwise it could be blamed as a whole.

      Well, I am sure people smarter than me have already thought of how to do anonymously do P2P.

    9. Re:Great, just what we need! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      We need something like this, something P2P, that sends out garbage data

      We have this already, it's called APK.

    10. Re: Great, just what we need! by maugle · · Score: 2

      I assume the receiver would attempt to decrypt every package and simply throw out any failures.

  2. Not TOR replacement... by wbr1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is potentially good for an obfuscated messaging service, not an encrypted internet proxy for all traffic.

    --
    Silence is a state of mime.
    1. Re:Not TOR replacement... by SuricouRaven · · Score: 2

      If they really need something that can't be easily identified as fake, I'm sure they can use markov chains are an important part of any consideration when the weather has started to darken.

  3. "Even with more than 50%..." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I wonder what % of Tor servers are compromised. I abandoned Tor when I realised it didn't mix in junk traffic like this, as traffic analysis through compromised nodes/routers is such an obvious vulnerability that it seems to render Tor worthless.

  4. What is happening at MIT? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Any bozo could write random garbage and waste bandwidth. Write something that can split encrypted data at the client through multiple nodes and recombine encrypted packets at the server. And make it an IP level protocol! Idiots!

  5. Vuvuzela by Megahard · · Score: 2

    So they're just tooting their own horn.

    --
    I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
  6. Re:No thanks. by KGIII · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Disclosure: MIT is my alma mater and I am biased. I have also served in the military and I have worked with DoD as a civilian.

    Now, some folks here are aware that I dealt with traffic modeling. Some of *my* research was paid for by the Department of Defense. (You'd be kind of silly to not understand the value of improving traffic throughput in a crisis. There are also benefits to optimized traffic in and on military facilities, both vehicular and pedestrian)

    I can not speak for this department nor for this research. I can, however, say that the DoD had absolutely no influence on my research. No, not one little bit. They wanted regular reports to see that they were getting a bit of work for their money. They did not control, direct, or hinder the research in any way other than the funding. They never exerted any control, never stopped me from publishing, nor did they come in and spy on the project.

    I can't say what has happened here but, honestly, I think you're drunk. How would the DoD benefit from this? Given that it is MIT, I'm quite sure you can see the source. Rather than speculate, give us a good reason to believe you other than a "hunch" or similar.

    --
    "So long and thanks for all the fish."
  7. Speak softly and carry a big stick. by leftover · · Score: 2

    I see this as the proverbial "big stick" to push back against the conglomeration of TLAs and communication oligarchies.
    "You don't want strong encryption? Then we will do this!"

    --
    Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
  8. Alternate solution. by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just get Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc... to stand up Tor exit nodes. Chum the pipeline with things like Gigli and The Last Airbender and let the NSA filter through all that. Maybe they'll just kill themselves - I know I would.

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  9. Really new ?!? by ctrl-alt-canc · · Score: 4, Funny

    > pollutes the network with dummy data
    probably not so different from internet as we know it, isn't it ?!?

  10. The Name by eumoria · · Score: 2

    It's a perfect name for it, regardless if it works. Tells you exactly what it does... "WHAT??? WHAT?!?!?! FUCKING VUVUZELAS!!!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...