4 ms·
CVE-2016-5696 and its effects on Tor
- ivan_ah 10y agoIf only all technical communication were as clear as this blog post... great explanation.
- goodplay 10y agoI personally found it too informal; I found the numerous non-technical remarks about how "boring" TCP off putting, tbh. That said, I understand that the author added these in an attempt to make the article more enjoyable. I also appreciate the fact that some readers will indeed find these additions enjoyable. To each his own.
- pseudointellect 10y ago> To each their own. FTFY. Please help make HN an inclusive environment. Thank you!
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- niij 10y agoI wish I had downvoting privileges.
- cmdrfred 10y agoUsername checks out. Joking aside, english is a very complex lanuage man and his (eg. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights") in contexts such as these do not indicate gender (though they may hint at the gender of the author). Only when speaking in the specific do gender pronouns mean anything. (eg. "She came up to me and said", "A group of men came in yesterday")
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- russell_sears 10y agoI read this explanation a few times, and am afraid I still don't understand why Tor is not vulnerable to this attack. Let's say I'm an attacker that provides enough bandwidth to compromise N% of client circuts, and I can disrupt non-compromised circuits at will. Casuing clients to repeatedly renegotiate non-compromised circuits lets me compromise >>N% of circuits, right? For small N, the chance of getting a compromised circuit is roughly linear in the number of circuit disruptions, right? Unless I'm missing something, this vulnerability provides a significant multiplier to existing Sybil attacks against Tor. A quick search suggests there have been Sybil attacks in the past. Am I missing something obvious here?
- zmanian 10y agoThis attack is a general amplifier on denial of service attacks on Linux server. If this attack was deployed against Tor, this would appear as a general DDOS attack against Tor and degrade most users experience. It would not help an attacker direct circuits towards a malicious exit as described in the paper.
- russell_sears 10y agoI still don't understand how you come to the conclusion that the attack won't work. The bolded text in the blog post reads "the middle relay will pick a different exit relay", and should read "the client will pick a new circuit at random using the same bandwidth-proportional weights." The security properties of the corrected description aren't very comforting: the attack is no longer guaranteed to work, just like there is no guarantee I will ever roll a one with a fair die.
- zmanian 10y agoYou'll get an exit with DDOS attack against it. Not an exit controlled by the attacker. The attacker will see the same fraction of Tor traffic with or without the attack. The Tor user base will notice a massively degraded experience. You can't affect the proportion of Tor traffic that flows through a given exit with a DDOS attack.
- nullcipher 10y agohttps://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/75ff39ccc1bd5d3c455b6822ab09e533c551f758 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/75ff39ccc1bd5d3c455... is the patch. Linus is credited with the suggestion.
- joshumax 10y agoDid anyone else click on the image and get redirected to this? https://blog.patternsinthevoid.net/static/images/2015/12/card.jpeg https://blog.patternsinthevoid.net/static/images/2015/12/car...
- sowellz 10y agoI noticed this as well, what I cant figure out is if it was an accident or not?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]