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Whither Tor? Building the Next Generation of Anonymity Tools (arstechnica.com)
"Tor hasn't changed, it's the world that's changed," says Aaron Johnson, the lead researcher on a 2013 paper which reported that 80% of Tor users could be de-anonymized within six months, and that today's users may want protection from different threats. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Ars Technica:
The most probable future we face is a world in which Tor continues to offer a good-but-not-perfect, general-purpose anonymity system, while new anonymity networks arrive offering stronger anonymity optimised for particular use-cases, like anonymous messaging, anonymous filesharing, anonymous microblogging, and anonymous voice-over-IP. Nor is the Tor Project standing still. Tor today is very different from the first public release more than a decade ago, [Tor project cofounder Nick] Mathewson is quick to point out. That evolution will continue.
"It's been my sense for ages that the Tor we use in five years will look very different from the Tor we use today," he says. "Whether that's still called Tor or not is largely a question of who builds and deploys it first. We are not stepping back from innovation. I want better solutions than we have today that are easier to use and protect people's privacy."
The article lists five projects that are "breaking new ground in developing stronger anonymity systems," including the Dissent Project, the Aqua and Herd projects (for filesharing and voice over IP), Vuvuzela/Alpenhorn (for anonymous chat), Riffle (filesharing), and Riposte (anonymous microblogging). Tor project cofounder Nick Mathewson is urging anonymity developers to begin using their own software. "What you learn about software from running it is like what you learn from food by tasting it... You can't actually know whether you've made a working solution for humans unless you give it to humans, including yourself."
"It's been my sense for ages that the Tor we use in five years will look very different from the Tor we use today," he says. "Whether that's still called Tor or not is largely a question of who builds and deploys it first. We are not stepping back from innovation. I want better solutions than we have today that are easier to use and protect people's privacy."
The article lists five projects that are "breaking new ground in developing stronger anonymity systems," including the Dissent Project, the Aqua and Herd projects (for filesharing and voice over IP), Vuvuzela/Alpenhorn (for anonymous chat), Riffle (filesharing), and Riposte (anonymous microblogging). Tor project cofounder Nick Mathewson is urging anonymity developers to begin using their own software. "What you learn about software from running it is like what you learn from food by tasting it... You can't actually know whether you've made a working solution for humans unless you give it to humans, including yourself."
Tell me Emerson Tan isn't GCHQ and I won't believe you. I bet a lot of their volunteers are spooks just as Snowden revealed a lot of nodes are spook run.
Tor has no credibility now, we need a new Tor.
They threw out Jacob Rapelbaum and managed to buy off Bruce Schneier among others...I guess a bit, fat check from the spooks will buy anyone these days.
On the other hand, when even the "co-founder" of the project is name-dropping better solutions than TOR itself, one wonders why people still put their faith and trust in the US Navy's honeypot in the first place...
If you make a completely safe and secure and anonymous communications system, the governments (all of them) will ban it. If you don't they will spy on you and you'll be worse off because you think you're safe.
Cypherpunks have been telling you Tor is garbage against GPA's and other highly characterized and well documented attacks like finding onions.... FOR YEARS.
Tor's funding masters DO NOT fund research into any kind of mitigating technologies that would go up against their masters (governments for one).
Tor is completely on the take from the US government and WILL NOT give up that funding source, the teat they suck from.
Tor Project Inc has blood on their hands regarding Jacob Appelbaum. As do all the SJW's that work for Tor and that Tor permits to hang around.
Tor REFUSES to acknowledge the standing OPEN PUBLIC REQUEST for its Board and Executive Minutes, the records of who voted on what motions, and the ByLaws under which they operate and operated, and all the documents they've filed with governments.
The new board and executive staff has enforced a policy of SILENCE across all their staff and themselves, and a policy of CENSORSHIP on their mailing list and IRC channels.
All of this is public knowledge, analysed and recorded in the annals of cypherpunks.
Tor is no longer a viable option for any conscientious or technical user.
It needs to be replaced with new tech by new people.
it is very sad we need all these privacy tools to avoid spying from corporations and gobernments
Clearly, the answer is "thither".
Maybe "hither"
You are welcome on my lawn.
One that just let you surf the web without being track by advertisers and installing cookies ad-hock and willy nilly.
The popularity of Tor (to say nothing of its origins) made it a defacto target for de-anonymizer agencies and anything widely used enough to be vetted also will have a similar effort attempting to undermine its core function. Security through codebase obscurity looks better every day.
Either you improve Tor or you kill anonymity on the net in a death by a thousand cuts.
Tor protocol can bring suspicion on you. It's pretty good when coupled with other tools with censoring countries as well as other reasons.
There's an old saying you move with the times or get left behind. the security sector is no different but the cost can be higher.
I think everyone who wanna keep anonymous is a criminal or wanna help criminals ans must get shot. Even knwoing about a nemd related with this issue must be investigated. I'm glad you spend 1 million trying to convince me that you got in love with game character and I for a chat robot. I would make you spend a million more for making me get apart real people because of your sick family and your methamphetamines business
Maybe for TOR, and certainly for VPN (as-implemented), is a specific vulnerability for packet sizes.
If 208.230.30.20 sends packets of 9098, 3039, and 3030 bytes, and I receive similar packets of the same size (plus or minus VPN headers), then I am already identifiable.
Is this different for Tor?
Kid-proof tablet..
The only way to guarantee privacy is to disconne//....
"Tor hasn't changed, it's the world that's changed," says Aaron Johnson, the lead researcher on a 2013 paper which reported that 80% of Tor users could be de-anonymized within six months, and that today's users may want protection from different threats.
I think this is it: most people are simply not all that worried about anonymity or privacy. Perhaps they are stupid, but on the other hand, it could be that it is just bit too paranoid to go to enormous lengths to protect one's privacy. I can see why - with smartphones and smart tvs and all the other silly gadgets, as well as credit cards that we use all over the place, we leave an enormous trail everywhere we go, and we allow companies access to our privacy almost without limitations; so how much is it actually worth that we encrypt emails and use Tor?
Oh, and before you hit the button and mod me down because you are miffed that I have an opinion you don't like - how about thinking up a really good reply that will cut me right down to size? It ought to be easy, if I'm such an idiot ;-)
Rotor, the tor fork
Focus an anonymity is all nice and good, but from my experience the biggest problem with Tor is that the exit nodes are so limited that the fact that you are using Tor is obvious for the server. Meaning websites will block you or become unusable due to requesting a CAPTCHA every few clicks. Thus you have anonymity, but your web access is so drastically limited that it becomes impractical to use Tor as every day Internet access, thus you switch back to a non-Tor browser and are left with no anonymity.
Are they doing the work with help from the NSA?
Passionately Indifferent
It's worth looking at HORNET, which is at this point not much more than a research paper, but it could point in the right direction. Instead of having anonymity for very few people (because of disadvantages to using anonymity tools, e.g. speed and latency), increase the anonymity pool by making anonymous communication less disadvantagous. With HORNET high throughput is achieved by providing Tor-like routing at the network layer (something which is currently not possible in the internet, but it might come with SCION, a BGP replacement that's in the works). I'm not saying that this will be ready anytime soon, but I think it's certainly an interesting idea. [full disclosure: I'm a researcher working on SCION]
I also think that Tor still is the best thing we have. The rumors about Tor's death are greatly exaggerated.
Using Tor only makes the government want to spy on you more; it will only help protect you from less sophisticated entities. Unfortunately, wanting to protect your privacy means the government will try even harder to spy on you.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
A lot of the issues come down to a general type of problem, one I term 'NSA/GCQH problems', namely "is this meaningful data?" type questions.
For example, if trying to decrypt a file, if one alphanumeric password of length 16 characters ends up with something like passable HTML or English text, chances are you have the right password. Thus there are easy(ish) ways for an attacker/listener to verify whether or not they have the the correct password. I imagine future anonymity systems will need to look at means of effective communication which do not allow such easy verification of a correct attack. That requirement, rather than defining _how_ information is anonymously transmitted, will define _what_ can sensibly be anonymously transmitted, and what practical use can be made of what can sensibly be anonymously transmitted.
Much of this comes down to making things computationally 'vague' in some well-defined way, so that 'attack problems' (like e.g. find the password for this AES encrypted file) are, in general, poorly defined and open-ended (so that the search space is effectively infinite). This means harnessing computational complexity in different ways to current mainstream cryptographic methods (though probably using them in conjunction with mainstream crypto).
This begins with taking real-world communication scenarios, asking what basic problem is being solved, and what communication is necessary for solving this problem, and considering the whole space of possibilities.
Crypto like AES has the nice property of being easily implemented on small custom hardware. For important things, it is sensible to at least contemplate methods which would take large amounts of ram and processor power (e.g. if it took 5s and 1GB RAM on my i5 laptop to encrypt and decrypt a 4k textual message into, say, a 256k binary blob, for the kinds of things TOR was originally about, which was not selling drugs and spreading kiddie porn, this would be acceptable). Doing it in such a way as to make the 'false positive' rate for an attacker very high (so restricting the format of communication to a very computer-friendly and formulaic language format, such that many plausible but incorrect 'decryptions' are possible, and non-interactive verification is hard). Stuff like that.
A lot of this really requires thinking outside-the-box about what we need to communicate, rather than sticking with everyday communication conventions and throwing all our effort at _how_ to transmit that everyday communication anonymously. I did envisage, years ago, something I termed the 'schizophone', which would generally throw around pseudo-bullshit in the forms of spiritual poetry or whatever, reminiscent of a psychotic mental patient, but for which there were well-defined means to extract meaning. But modelling the communication language on the kind of crap people send round twitter these days, you get a kind of steganography-on-acid where attackers have a hard enough time figuring out what is even meaningful. (Then there is the fun of defining 'meaningful' in terms of mathematically hard language recognition problems of the NP-complete kind, where the 'certificate' functions as a filter, a little like the 'chaffing and winnowing' paper talked about a while back: if I have an NP-complete problem for a language L, where L is contained in some larger computationally efficient language L2 (by being much less stringent about what is in L2 than in L) and both an element of this language s, a certificate c, and many other elements of L2 all encoded in some blob, it is feasible to extract all possible candidates for elements of L2 from that blob, but without access to c, verifying which are elements of L is much harder, assuming P != NP, or that in the event that P = NP, there is still a significant gulf between the best 'solver' and a decent 'checker'.)
John_Chalisque
Deal breaker right there.
The whole point of freedom is to reduce dependency on other people. We do for ourselves,
"The Next Generation of Anonymity Tools"
Here we go again. An article making theoretical and planned projects sound like they're ready to go, up and running, rock stable, and seeing adoption pick up. We seem to be getting articles like this about once a month. The reality is that no such projects exist beyond what somebody envisions maybe getting developed in the next few years.
Ain't a damn thing changed so stop trying to make it sound otherwise.
From Article:
"The original design documents highlight the system's vulnerability to a "global passive adversary" that can see all the traffic both entering and leaving the Tor network."
It seems to me, that the low-hanging fruit here would be to mass-implement TOR Onion Services to make normal websites reachable from within the network without exit servers being needed. .onion version.
Just as was done with SSL, a TOR-Everywhere plugin could jump-start things, pointing users' browsers automatically at the