Slashdot Mirror
MIT Says Their Anonymity Network Is More Secure Than Tor (pcmag.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via PC Magazine: Following the recent vulnerabilities in Tor, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne have been working on a new anonymity network that they say is more secure than Tor. While the researchers are planning to present their new system, dubbed Riffle, at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium later this month, they did say the system uses existing cryptographic techniques, but in new ways. A series of servers are what make up Riffle, each of which "permutes the order in which it receives messages before passing them on to the next," according to a news release. "For instance, messages from senders Alice, Bob, and Carol reach the first server in the order A, B, C, that server would send them to the second server in a different order -- say C, B, A. The second server would permute them before sending them to the third, and so on." Nobody would know which was which by the time they exited the last server. Both Tor and MIT's anonymity network use onion encryption. Riffle uses a technique called verifiable shuffle in addition to onion encryption to thwart tampering and prevent adversaries from infiltrating servers with their own code. Last but not least, it uses authentication encryption to verify the authenticity of an encrypted message. The researchers say their system provides strong security while using bandwidth much more efficiently than similar solutions.
Don't break the law or be a pervert. Then you won't need encryption. If you're not breaking the law (that includes stealing content by peer-to-peer downloads) and being a pervert, you have nothing to worry about.
The communication latency must be even suckier than that of Tor then... Oh, well...
Now, is it really a great new tool for privacy, or does it have inherent back doors and the announcements are to lure us away from Tor, which authorities have found too difficult to break? Will we even ever know?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This approach does NOT fix the linked "vulnerabilities" about the TOR network, where compromised nodes as members of the network can spy on traffic, and a sufficiently large amount can even totally identify users. This vulnerability is unfixable by systems where you let everyone set up a node.
...but after what you helped the U.S. government do to Aaron Swartz, i.e. drive him to the brink of suicide and then over the edge, I find any claims you make regarding your abilities to be suspect at the very least.
Sad, really, that the name in education that has been synonymous with "hackers" for decades, now serves as one of their worst enemies. Much like CMU aiding the FBI in "discovering" the locations of hidden Tor services (http://www.teaparty.org/academics-accused-helping-fbi-unmask-anonymity-web-users-129406/), MIT and their graduates have shown their true colours...by bending over and taking it from the fascists in Quantico and Washington, by using their talents and their education to take freedom _away_ from the world rather than give. All for the same sort of fat government cheques they were getting in the 80's, making bold claims about how they could implement artificial intelligence sophisticated enough to power Reagan's insane "Star Wars" missile defense system. This in _spite_ of the fact that full debugging of such software would _require_ a world-ending, nuclear war to occur.
Fuck MIT and their shitty software. Say what you want about traitors, most people accept that they aren't to be trusted.
How much kitty porn can I transfer per second over it?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
My guess is some three letter government organization....
Let's face it folks, if privacy and security are important to you, DON'T do it on the Internet. There is no such thing as Privacy and Security on the Internet and that is NEVER going to change. Sure, you can obfuscate and encrypt and maybe buy yourself some time, but as soon as a packet hits your ISP, you had better just figure it's public knowledge because *somebody* could be listening in and you'd never know it.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
and those contracts can be a powerful incentive.
If it is 100% free and open, then maybe.
wait and see
The NSA doesn't own most of their endpoints...yet.
But if you need to actually want to be secure on "the main Internet" you should use Tails 1.4.1. Look for it on kat.cr (kickass torrents)
You should also add these two lines to your torrc because the US Gov is the primary problem and wasted the most tax dollars on Earth to set up surveillance. The most ever in history.
find your torrc and add
StrictNodes 1
ExcludeNodes {us}
Comment them out if you absolutely have to with # before each line, change back for unrestricted Tor. Or use bridges btw.
If it were truly effective, it would be "born secret" and not released to the public unless it is crippled.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"MIT claims new anonymity network that they say is more secure than Tor."
Until they get hacked by UCSD, UofT, ParisTech, Anonymous, NSA, GCHQ, the Russians, the Chinese, ...
Consider the hypotheticals which would be true if Tor were as secure as they say.
First, Tor would be knowingly aiding and abetting in the distribution and consumption of child pornography. They would be aware of this, but they would consider it the price you have to pay in order to keep people anonymous online.
Do you think that that is a realistic proposition?
Consider their recent actions against Jacob Applebaum.
http://jacobappelbaum.net/
This is a group of people who went after someone in full SJW witchhunt mode, which is to say it featured anonymous accusors making unsubstantiaABLE claims of a incindiary, sexual nature , a public appeal for more accusors to copycat them under the guise of "seeking more victims", and a Star Chamber style execution of the target.
And these are the exact same people who are going to aide and abet child pornographers - out of principle.
Then there's the people who are at the helm of Tor. For example, Sherri Steele (no Wikipedia entry!). Meet Sherri's husband:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"He is married to Shari Steele, former Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,[5][6] currently Executive Director of the Tor Project.[7]
Prior to Liquid Robotics, he was the President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Microsystems Federal (a Sun Microsystems subsidiary focusing on business with government organizations). He held numerous positions during his more than 10 years at Sun, including Vice-President of Corporate Software Services, Chief Security Officer for Sun IT, and Chief Information Officer (CIO). His background has a significant military and government presence, including a stint as an oversight CIO working underneath the Department of Defense's overall CIO. Before that, he was the Chief Technical Officer and Technical Lead for the U.S. Army's personnel systems.
I am sure he/she is onboard with the whole kiddie porn thing along with his employers.
Then there's the zombie issue of Who Funds Tor- the question that just won't die. What Tor says is it doesn't matter that the government holds the all the practical purse strings (yours and my donation is not keeping the Tor lights on) , the code is the code.
But the code is not the nodes, and let's face it, to maintain the number of servers needed to p0wn the Tor network would be less than the NSA spends on erasers in a month. It would be a rounding error. Think they spent that money? Just, do you?
If the FBI and the NSA are worth a shit, they now have people planted at every level of the Tor development project, people with the clout and numbers sufficient to make hire/ fire/ burn-at-the-stake decisions. That HAD to be a goal of theirs, right? Now do you think they're competent agencies? I sure do.
The reaility is, Tor works closely with the government ot catch badguys. JUST LIKE I WOULD, JUST LIKE YOU WOULD. Think about it. The government comes and says: "kiddie porn child sex trafficking terrorists etc etc etc we need to work together we promise we'll only nab these types promise promise promise" do you cooperate? Really, do you? I sure do and I understand the importance as much as anyone whose made a determined effort to hear all sides of the privacy-security debate and basically considers both extremes to represent mortal dangers to the Republic and civilization itself.
When you're in that position of having to side with one of two possible nightmare scenarios- a George Orwellian nightmare government which can never be vanquished or a terorist organization with, say an unstoppable lethal virus or other civilization-destroying WMD and a guarantee of kiddie porn rings harming real kids, which do you choose, because you HAVE to choose ?
I'll tell you who you choose.
You choose the government because you tell yourself, not untruthfully, that even in a worse case scenario, it's still an error civilization
MIT has been a government contractor since the 1940's
Where's the download link?
Where's the exit nodes?
Where's the network?
I don't see a website for Riffle, only a .pdf.
There are even other projects at MIT with the same name. (Riffle water monitoring system)
https://civic.mit.edu/blog/hhcraig/open-water-project-exploring-open-source-water-quality-monitoring
This 'Riffle' is just a paper not an actual network, afaict.
MaidSafe's Safe Network is definitely going to change the internet as we know it.
Is the source code available for review? Have significant security reviews taken place? If you're looking for a tor alternative, why not consider EepSites first? They appear highly recommended and have been around much longer. I doubt they're even monitored yet, since I so rarely hear of people using them...
Our liberties -- even the liberty to do stupid pranks without disproportionate consequences -- have been curtailed.
GREAT!!! Now let's ask Aaron Swartz how trustworthy MIT is.
It undoubtedly has a backdoor for US "intelligence" agencies to snoop on it.