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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."
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.
Clearly, the answer is "thither".
Maybe "hither"
You are welcome on my lawn.
gobernments?
Wait, I see:
Top 25 Gobernment profiles | LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/title...
Liberal Gobernment archives:
http://aptn.ca/news/tag/libera...
Smart Gobernment. UA Smart University - Universidad de Alicante:
http://web.ua.es/en/smart/smar...
etc...
Dummy me, just googling for "Gobernment" made me realize that it is just another valid way to spell "Government"...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Why not I2P or Freenet?
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Snowden didn't tell me anything I didn't know.
Remember Heartbleed? Tell me Robin Seggelmann isn't on the NSA payroll and I won't believe you. Tell me he's unemployed, and I might believe you. But he's not unemployed, after making the stupidest fucking mistake EVER.
And it goes deeper than one guy allegedly fucking up code in the most critical piece of security software in the world.
RFC6520-- WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS EXIST? Because it's too computationally expensive for clients to re-establish SSL sessions...?! Really? My dual core 2.15ghz smart phone begs to differ.
Highly suspicious that this RFC even exists, and then later is the source of the biggest FUCK UP in security coding history.
The fucking game is rigged. There is no privacy. There is no security.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
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..
Snowden didn't tell me anything I didn't know.
There is a difference between believing that the world is round and getting it proved.
Snowden didn't tell anyone anything that people didn't already suspected. The difference is that before Snowden one would be disregarded as a tinfoil hat rather than a realist.
What Snowden did was to give you credibility. You lacked it before, even if you didn't realize it.
The only way to guarantee privacy is to disconne//....
I'm afraid that TOR is your only really good alternative here. I use TOR specifically for that reason. Something that can protect journalists from repressive governments should be more than enough to protect me from data hungry companies. The issue here is that it doesn't depend on client software alone. Just alone your ip address can often be used to almost uniquely identify you. How many devices share your internet connection? Do you connect your phone to the WiFi? Then you've lost.
"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 ;-)
TOR is still the best option, and for the most part it works as advertised. It's possible to sometimes unmask users, usually relying on them making mistakes, but it's an expensive and time consuming process.
The issue is that it needs continuous development and scrutiny to keep it secure. Appelbaum really screwed the project but it's important that it manages to recover, because at the moment there is nothing else comparable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
> RFC6520-- WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS EXIST? Because it's too computationally expensive for clients to re-establish SSL sessions...?! Really? My dual core 2.15ghz smart phone begs to differ.
No. It's not about CPU time, but about the time taken to establish a connection due to the TLS and TCP handshakes. I think it's only a single round trip for the TLS part (someone will surely correct me if not) but that's on top of the TCP 3 way handshake, which all adds up. You can't mitigate network latency with a faster CPU.
These are partly the same reasons for http2 by the way. Re-using a single connection means avoiding the TCP and TLS setup happening more than once.
Finally, keeping a connection open for a long time and re-using it goes some small way to avoid revealing as much metadata to snoopers, as does multiplexing a single TLS connection rather than creating many.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
It is two round trips: client hello, server hello, client exchange, server finished.
What a bunch of baseless FUD. The new board was picked precisely because they are beyond reproach. If you think Bruce Schneier and Matt Blaze are government stooges then you might as well just give up trying because no researcher can be trusted.
Okay so people won't trust the Tor organization, with longstanding community heroes on the board like Bruce Schneier and Matt Blaze, but they will trust a random fork of Tor that is made by anonymous nobodies with a questionable agenda. Very smart.
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
For trust you need an open protocol specification that can be evaluated in itself. Then you can write your own implementation that you know is safe or you can use an open source alternative that may or may not be compromised or you can use a binary that may or may not be compromised. The protocol itself needs to be resilient against man in the middle attacks so that you aren't exposed just because a few other users are using version that are actively trying to figure out where the packets come from.
Literally all of those things are true of Tor, so I don't know wtf your point is here.
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
I didn't mean to trust Tor because of them, I meant their presence was not a reason to NOT trust Tor, as some people are claiming.
Deal breaker right there.
The whole point of freedom is to reduce dependency on other people. We do for ourselves,
I closed my node after reading those news. Jacob is a very outspoken enemy of the surveillance state. His speech To protect and infect part 2 was one of the best about the Snowden revelations.
Jacob was expelled from Tor based on several types of accusations made in a website, including rape, intense kisses and crude language (they went for all the audiences). His friends here sort of expelled too when they didn't believe all the accusations or pointed some of them were false (indirectly by claiming they were covering for a rapist and making personal attacks). They went after his other businesses and his doctorate too. It was textbook character assassination.
Write a blog purpoting to be one of their victims
Email/text their colleagues, neighbours, friends etc
For those who are interested on what happened to Jacob former face of Tor that is also involved with Wikileaks:
The weaponising of social (Analysis from some person on the internet)
What has this man done? (On the German Magazine Zeit online - in English)
"I am not a victim of Jake," she told Die Zeit. She says she told a friend about the intense kiss in confidence. This story was not merely used on the website without her permission – she says the story was also "heavily manipulated."
I should warn that they are very long reads.
Now there is an "ex-cia" agent working on Tor.
The person responsible for a questionable website with at least some false accusations and the exit of several developers holds a key position.
There is increased development on usage statistics (that does make sense and is a response on attacks being used against tor - I am being paranoid here, but I wasn't a paranoid enough before Snowden and was proven a fool).
Also, as much as I admire Schneier for his work and would like his addition if it was in other circumstances, something that always bothered me about him is that he always focused on the NSA violations against Americans and American companies. I don't remember him criticizing the NSA for spying on innocent foreigners and on other countries (despite international agreements and the fact that foreigners are people too), I would like to be shown otherwise, but if he did it was tangentially. His discourse has always been that they should do a better job at protecting American national security and companies (and not that such military powers shouldn't exist).
Yes, in principle no researcher can be trusted (Carnegie Mellon, RSA). Jacob was not there because he was beyond reproach, he was there because he was an activist. Now we have some people supposedly "beyond reproach".
But the new board is not beyond reproach, as the person that did make false accusations against Jacob is in it.
Anyone who is not being persecuted for their activism should raise an eyebrow, even Schneier, who chose a very strange moment to join the project.
Most of what we claimed before Snowden was FUD, but it was correct and incomplete.