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> Unless your adversary is lucky enough to pwn the guard for that onion site, they can't even see the correlation. We're talking about an attacker that can see

> Unless your adversary is lucky enough to pwn the guard for that onion site, they can't even see the correlation. We're talking about an attacker that can see every byte going over the wire, encrypted or not it's still able to measure the volume of data itself. > Well, first thing, you don't send many MB directly to someone. You put it on a Tor onion file-share site, and PM the link via Tor. In that example the attacker wants to determine the location/IP of the hidden service itself. It's pretty well known that high traffic / volume hidden services are some of the easiest targets for global traffic analysis. > I can imagine a global passive adversary that could log all Internet traffic, and make it searchable. The NSA can somewhat do that. They don't have to log the data itself simply the meta data and in specific the volume of data sent between vertices in the graph. Various agencies have openly admitted they keep this information and it's not considered "protected" in their view. This is simply a graph analysis problem, similar to how Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous unless you use specific methods that aren't built into the core protocol.

mirimir 8y ago
Sure, the NSA can arguably see every byte on every wire. But that wouldn't do them much good, unless they knew what to compare with what, over what time period. But OK, say that they had the processing power to compare every traffic stream with every other traffic stream, with time offset up to a week or so. That still wouldn't tell them whether Mirimir had shared something with someone else. Because we'd all be using Tor. And about onion file-sharing sites. With OnionShare, you can create a site just for that transfer.
- zrm 8y ago
  What you're describing is equivalent to a dead drop, which is an old school anonymity method. It's not that it doesn't work, it's that it's completely independent of Tor and it doesn't work in all the contexts where Tor is supposed to work. If Alice uploads the file and Bob downloads it immediately then you haven't gained anything. Bob has to wait some time for it to work, which means you didn't actually need a low-latency anonymity network to begin with. You can't use it for things that actually need real-time communication, like for live streaming or anything interactive.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    True. But Tor is the large anonymity network that we have. I2P is cool, but it's too small. For high latency, perhaps Mixmaster remailers via alt.anonymous.messages is still workable. Last I checked, there was a Tor onion news server. I agree about unworkability for real-time communication. But there, you want to keep messages small. And use padding. Trying to make live streaming anonymous is nontrivial.

mirimir 8y ago

Sure, the NSA can arguably see every byte on every wire. But that wouldn't do them much good, unless they knew what to compare with what, over what time period. But OK, say that they had the processing power to compare every traffic stream with every other traffic stream, with time offset up to a week or so. That still wouldn't tell them whether Mirimir had shared something with someone else. Because we'd all be using Tor. And about onion file-sharing sites. With OnionShare, you can create a site just for that transfer.

zrm 8y ago
What you're describing is equivalent to a dead drop, which is an old school anonymity method. It's not that it doesn't work, it's that it's completely independent of Tor and it doesn't work in all the contexts where Tor is supposed to work. If Alice uploads the file and Bob downloads it immediately then you haven't gained anything. Bob has to wait some time for it to work, which means you didn't actually need a low-latency anonymity network to begin with. You can't use it for things that actually need real-time communication, like for live streaming or anything interactive.
- mirimir 8y ago
  True. But Tor is the large anonymity network that we have. I2P is cool, but it's too small. For high latency, perhaps Mixmaster remailers via alt.anonymous.messages is still workable. Last I checked, there was a Tor onion news server. I agree about unworkability for real-time communication. But there, you want to keep messages small. And use padding. Trying to make live streaming anonymous is nontrivial.