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Why is this phrased as if it's Cloudflare's fault? If it's this easy for a side effect of a recapcha image to de-anonymize a Tor user, then this seems like a
by Johnny555 10y ago
Why is this phrased as if it's Cloudflare's fault?
If it's this easy for a side effect of a recapcha image to de-anonymize a Tor user, then this seems like a failing of the Tor protocol that they should fix. Maybe they need to introduce more jitter, repackage requests into a single stream with consistent (or randomized) packet size, or pad the packets with random data.
- rohit89 10y agoIntroducing jitter would mean increasing latency and generally slowing down your browsing.
- softawre 10y agoas a tradeoff for security? Ok.. I mean, using a VPN is slower than not, but tons of people use them
- rohit89 10y agoThe effect will be exaggerated since tor traffic goes through three nodes and random jitter would need to be added for each. In general, beating traffic analysis in a low latency network is a hard problem. You could have perfect anonymity if you could add arbitrary delays but that would make the network unusably slow.
- Johnny555 10y agoSo make it a configurable option that you can turn on and off when you need it. Having to wait a few seconds for a web page to load seems like a small price to pay to avoid government agents banging on your door because you're looking at "subversive content".
- rohit89 10y agoThe delays would have to be longer than that, not just a few seconds. You're looking at minutes to hours for strong guarantees. Also having a configurable option could make you more fingerprintable.
- Grollicus 10y agoIt is reCAPTCHA's fault. (kind of, I mean its just the way its built) Still, if you browse the web via Tor you will see reCAPTCHAs everywhere because of Cloudflare. And that IS Cloudflare's fault, and its really annoying which is propably why this article is phrased this way.