10 ms·

Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (2004)

84 points by jarvl 8y ago

jayess 8y ago
It mentions mixmaster and mixminion, but those projects seem to have died. I feel like they are needed more than ever.
- simmons 8y ago
  Indeed. I've often thought that such high-latency mix-nets (with their potentially superior resistance to traffic analysis) would be a nice complement to low-latency networks like Tor.
  - ahf 8y ago
    Have a look at Katzenpost. They are trying to build a modern, high-latency, mix network. https://katzenpost.mixnetworks.org/ https://katzenpost.mixnetworks.org/
  - admax88q 8y ago
    I2P provides cover traffic. I believe GNUnet can also be configured to use a certain amount of cover traffic.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    The downside is that browsing the web on a service like that sucks ass. Tor trades off some security for a basic level of user experience. Sadly, modern web design makes stuff like WWWoffle less useful than it used to be. Plus it's difficult to set up fully anonymous services on the far side of the link, I mean you're using Tor for a reason, and leaving breadcrumbs on the far side of the network is risky.
    - metildaa 8y ago
      Using TBB has gotten much better over the past few years, often you can stream YouTube without much issue.
Jumziey 8y ago
Apparently not safe for work
- TomMarius 8y ago
  A company could have a lot of problems if one of their employees decided to host a node in their network, so quite literally yeah
  - vbezhenar 8y ago
    What kind of problems company could have?
    - lozaning 8y ago
      I ran an exit node at home for a couple months. Within minutes of my dynamic IP being updated from my ISP, cloudflare could figure out that I was an exit node, and then would fail to differentiate my own, non tor traffic, with that of the traffic exiting my node. The result being every single cloudflare backed website will hit you with a captcha on every page you view. My ISP would also randomly shut off my connection with some vague email about having compromised computer on my network i needed to fix. I'd have to call and make up some story to get them to turn my internet back on. Essentially all kinds of people associate TOR with unsavory activity and as such put hoops to jump through when accessing stuff through tor. When you host an exit node your non tor traffic is considered to be outbound TOR traffic based on the IP the traffic originates from. I cant imagine what would happen if I ran a node on the same network as our email server. I have to assume that we'd get blacklisted for spam quick if our mx resolved to a tor exit node IP. Then there's the whole issue of more or less being guaranteed to be complicit in the distribution of CP. With really only safe harbor laws protecting you.
      - jandrese 8y ago
        People associate TOR with unsavory activity because TOR is used for unsavory activity. Running an exit node on a link you care about is insanity. The main reason I have never run an exit node is fear that some overzealous LEO trying to make a name for himself is going to trace an IP off of a kiddie porn or drug market to my house and send in SWAT to break all of my windows and tie me up in court for months before deciding that charging me as an accomplice probably won't work this time because I didn't opt for the public defender.
vippy 8y ago
I keep copies of these papers in a safe in case I never need to re-develop the Internet from scratch. No seriously, the Tor papers are amazing and even hint at the means by which Tor might be manipulated to, say, track down someone like Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road, who is currently serving a double life sentence, plus forty years, without the possibility of parole.
- snvzz 8y ago
  >Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road, who is currently serving For running a free market. It's fucked up.
  - onetimemanytime 8y ago
    Can I open e free market for contract killers? Lowest bidder and fastest killer would win
    - ohithereyou 8y ago
      Imagine what a mess the assassination insurance industry would be given how much of a mess that the health insurance industry is.
      - onetimemanytime 8y ago
        We (most of us) take it for granted but I'm pretty sure quite a few people are scared to death, dead man walking due to drug deals gone bad, extortion, blood feuds, kidnappings and so on. I'm sure super rich people have these conversations, just we discuss finding a cheap apartment. My view is that if someone wants you dead, it's just a matter or time, or price. Maybe the Pope and POTUS are out of reach, the rest if you can't finish them with a handgun you can with an Ar-15.
        yellowapple 8y ago
        "Maybe the Pope and POTUS are out of reach" John F. Kennedy would like a word.
miles_bytes81 8y ago
I love Tor and use it often (also collaborated with code and nodes). But the problem lately is that all sites are banning it. Even HN, gives you trouble when connecting through Tor.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  Tor is often a vector for abuse, so tor node IPs get banned. I'd like to see a way to have nodes block certain origins without being able to identify them.
Ajedi32 8y ago
Tor is great, but it's always been a bit slow. Now that cryptocurrency is a thing, I often wonder if that problem could be solved by incentivizing the running of relays and exit nodes through microtransactions without compromising privacy. Would be great if we could make Tor fast enough that it could actually be used as a substitute for commercial VPNs.
- Forbo 8y ago
  In my experience, Tor runs about as well as ProtonVPN with their "Secure Core" option enabled (which adds routing through an additional hop located somewhere in the EU). Tor has pretty good throughput, I think the problem is the the additional latency that comes from routing through multiple nodes.
- jstanley 8y ago
  It's not too slow these days. I routinely browse over Tor, including watching YouTube videos, and it doesn't feel substantially different to just my ordinary ADSL connection.
- kodablah 8y ago
  Tor's slowness (often overstated) is more about hop count and geographic diversity than relay/exit node count.
- blfr 8y ago
  It has been getting faster lately, and I mean last couple of years. Or maybe my tolerance grew from using LTE but I'm pretty sure it has been getting faster.
- conradev 8y ago
  That is being worked on! It’s called Orchid: https://www.orchid.com/ https://www.orchid.com/
  - kodablah 8y ago
    Is there more info about active development? That site doesn't say much. I found some GitHub repos that were last updated in the summer[0]. It's going to be unfortunate if they stay with AGPL. 0 - https://github.com/orchidsource https://github.com/orchidsource
AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
There is also I2P which is just like Tor but unlike it is designed to withstand the traffic from bittorrent clients (useful for people living in dorms on in America) and can also tunnel UDP (unlike Tor which can only tunnel TCP). That being said, I really like the new onion-v3 protocol that Tor added as it moves from the outdated 1024-bit rsa + sha1 addresses with 1024-bit DH and AES-128 to the state-of-the-art ed25519 for addresses and handshake as well as chacha20-poly1305 for encryption.
- LMYahooTFY 8y ago
  I think it's an important distinction that one has identified developers, and one has anonymous developers. It doesn't seem clear to me that one is generally better than another, I think they complement each other.
malvosenior 8y ago
Tor is great! Sadly HN shadow bans all accounts created with it. Lots of other services also won’t let you sign up or require a phone verification if you use it.
ngneer 8y ago
News?

84 points by jarvl 8y ago

jayess 8y ago

It mentions mixmaster and mixminion, but those projects seem to have died. I feel like they are needed more than ever.

simmons 8y ago
Indeed. I've often thought that such high-latency mix-nets (with their potentially superior resistance to traffic analysis) would be a nice complement to low-latency networks like Tor.
- ahf 8y ago
  Have a look at Katzenpost. They are trying to build a modern, high-latency, mix network. https://katzenpost.mixnetworks.org/ https://katzenpost.mixnetworks.org/
- admax88q 8y ago
  I2P provides cover traffic. I believe GNUnet can also be configured to use a certain amount of cover traffic.
- jandrese 8y ago
  The downside is that browsing the web on a service like that sucks ass. Tor trades off some security for a basic level of user experience. Sadly, modern web design makes stuff like WWWoffle less useful than it used to be. Plus it's difficult to set up fully anonymous services on the far side of the link, I mean you're using Tor for a reason, and leaving breadcrumbs on the far side of the network is risky.
  - metildaa 8y ago
    Using TBB has gotten much better over the past few years, often you can stream YouTube without much issue.

Jumziey 8y ago

Apparently not safe for work

TomMarius 8y ago
A company could have a lot of problems if one of their employees decided to host a node in their network, so quite literally yeah
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  What kind of problems company could have?
  - lozaning 8y ago
    I ran an exit node at home for a couple months. Within minutes of my dynamic IP being updated from my ISP, cloudflare could figure out that I was an exit node, and then would fail to differentiate my own, non tor traffic, with that of the traffic exiting my node. The result being every single cloudflare backed website will hit you with a captcha on every page you view. My ISP would also randomly shut off my connection with some vague email about having compromised computer on my network i needed to fix. I'd have to call and make up some story to get them to turn my internet back on. Essentially all kinds of people associate TOR with unsavory activity and as such put hoops to jump through when accessing stuff through tor. When you host an exit node your non tor traffic is considered to be outbound TOR traffic based on the IP the traffic originates from. I cant imagine what would happen if I ran a node on the same network as our email server. I have to assume that we'd get blacklisted for spam quick if our mx resolved to a tor exit node IP. Then there's the whole issue of more or less being guaranteed to be complicit in the distribution of CP. With really only safe harbor laws protecting you.
    - jandrese 8y ago
      People associate TOR with unsavory activity because TOR is used for unsavory activity. Running an exit node on a link you care about is insanity. The main reason I have never run an exit node is fear that some overzealous LEO trying to make a name for himself is going to trace an IP off of a kiddie porn or drug market to my house and send in SWAT to break all of my windows and tie me up in court for months before deciding that charging me as an accomplice probably won't work this time because I didn't opt for the public defender.

vippy 8y ago

I keep copies of these papers in a safe in case I never need to re-develop the Internet from scratch. No seriously, the Tor papers are amazing and even hint at the means by which Tor might be manipulated to, say, track down someone like Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road, who is currently serving a double life sentence, plus forty years, without the possibility of parole.

snvzz 8y ago
>Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road, who is currently serving For running a free market. It's fucked up.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  Can I open e free market for contract killers? Lowest bidder and fastest killer would win
  - ohithereyou 8y ago
    Imagine what a mess the assassination insurance industry would be given how much of a mess that the health insurance industry is.
    - onetimemanytime 8y ago
      We (most of us) take it for granted but I'm pretty sure quite a few people are scared to death, dead man walking due to drug deals gone bad, extortion, blood feuds, kidnappings and so on. I'm sure super rich people have these conversations, just we discuss finding a cheap apartment. My view is that if someone wants you dead, it's just a matter or time, or price. Maybe the Pope and POTUS are out of reach, the rest if you can't finish them with a handgun you can with an Ar-15.
      - yellowapple 8y ago
        "Maybe the Pope and POTUS are out of reach" John F. Kennedy would like a word.

miles_bytes81 8y ago

I love Tor and use it often (also collaborated with code and nodes). But the problem lately is that all sites are banning it. Even HN, gives you trouble when connecting through Tor.

lallysingh 8y ago
Tor is often a vector for abuse, so tor node IPs get banned. I'd like to see a way to have nodes block certain origins without being able to identify them.

Ajedi32 8y ago

Tor is great, but it's always been a bit slow. Now that cryptocurrency is a thing, I often wonder if that problem could be solved by incentivizing the running of relays and exit nodes through microtransactions without compromising privacy. Would be great if we could make Tor fast enough that it could actually be used as a substitute for commercial VPNs.

Forbo 8y ago
In my experience, Tor runs about as well as ProtonVPN with their "Secure Core" option enabled (which adds routing through an additional hop located somewhere in the EU). Tor has pretty good throughput, I think the problem is the the additional latency that comes from routing through multiple nodes.
jstanley 8y ago
It's not too slow these days. I routinely browse over Tor, including watching YouTube videos, and it doesn't feel substantially different to just my ordinary ADSL connection.
kodablah 8y ago
Tor's slowness (often overstated) is more about hop count and geographic diversity than relay/exit node count.
blfr 8y ago
It has been getting faster lately, and I mean last couple of years. Or maybe my tolerance grew from using LTE but I'm pretty sure it has been getting faster.
conradev 8y ago
That is being worked on! It’s called Orchid: https://www.orchid.com/ https://www.orchid.com/
- kodablah 8y ago
  Is there more info about active development? That site doesn't say much. I found some GitHub repos that were last updated in the summer[0]. It's going to be unfortunate if they stay with AGPL. 0 - https://github.com/orchidsource https://github.com/orchidsource

AnaniasAnanas 8y ago

There is also I2P which is just like Tor but unlike it is designed to withstand the traffic from bittorrent clients (useful for people living in dorms on in America) and can also tunnel UDP (unlike Tor which can only tunnel TCP). That being said, I really like the new onion-v3 protocol that Tor added as it moves from the outdated 1024-bit rsa + sha1 addresses with 1024-bit DH and AES-128 to the state-of-the-art ed25519 for addresses and handshake as well as chacha20-poly1305 for encryption.

LMYahooTFY 8y ago
I think it's an important distinction that one has identified developers, and one has anonymous developers. It doesn't seem clear to me that one is generally better than another, I think they complement each other.

malvosenior 8y ago

Tor is great! Sadly HN shadow bans all accounts created with it. Lots of other services also won’t let you sign up or require a phone verification if you use it.

ngneer 8y ago

News?