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Nobody with an ounce of intelligence can believe for one moment that the most powerful intelligence agencies in the most powerful country of the world will stan

Nobody with an ounce of intelligence can believe for one moment that the most powerful intelligence agencies in the most powerful country of the world will stand idly by and watch a protocol/network be completely opaque for them. Whether there is evidence or not (in such cases there may never be enough evidence), it is safe to assume that many if not most Tor exit nodes are govt run (various govts), and one or more of the top intelligence agencies of the world can break Tor by more than one method. The only form of safe communication is one that relies on old fashioned and proven methods, utilising code and algo that has been scrutinised by researchers from many nations. People really wanting to be anonymous will do well to be wary of heavily 'promoted' solutions.

onetimemanytime 7y ago
How do various embassies contact the mothership? I heard that a lot of them use TOR, and for smaller countries it makes sense. Big countries I suppose have their brew (which is not necessarily safer.)
- Santosh83 7y ago
  I'd be surprised if the big countries used plain Tor for their vital communication. They would be having their own secret networks or tunnel through Tor. Small countries have probably simply given up hiding their intelligence from the big ones at this point and are simply interested in ensuring their immediate rivals are kept out, which Tor can probably do.
  - Paul-ish 7y ago
    A custom protocol can potentially be fingerprinted. I wouldn't be surprised if they used something less sophisticated. Like (encrypted) direct messages on twitter/reddit/facebook. This way the traffic blends with the rest.
    - nameismypw 7y ago
      There's a companion project to Tor called obs4proxy which is designed to hide the protocol's implementation.
    - kijin 7y ago
      It doesn't need to be a completely custom protocol. HTTPS can handle a very large percentage of anyone's communication needs these days.
      - Paul-ish 7y ago
        An application level protocol implemented on top of HTTPS can be fingerprinted. If you look up "Website Traffic Fingerprinting" you will see what I mean. That traffic is encrypted.
  - closeparen 7y ago
    For official operations, they would not be using the internet in any way, but their own parallel enterprise networks. Tor could be useful for covert operatives, and for generally weakening the grip of governments where we are inducing "popular" uprisings.
- dogma1138 7y ago
  Not a single intelligence agency or diplomatic service will rely on ToR for security that’s madness. A properly configured commercial or open source VPN is considerably more reliable and secure than ToR since you have no idea who is listening on the exit nodes or who can execute unmasking attacks by traffic shaping or monitoring if they control enough relays. For the most part any country which can perform intelligence collection out of its embassy will have sufficient budget and and technical capacity to develop their own secure means of phoning home. Also for highly sensitive material a diplomatic pouch is still the most secure means of transport as it never leaves your sight and is never inspected and if you do get intercepted then destroying physical media is much easier than securing network traffic to the same level of assurance.
  - seisvelas 7y ago
    Unless they communicate via a hidden service, in which case there is no exit node, so that particular problem is easy to avoid.
  - dontbenebby 7y ago
    >Not a single intelligence agency or diplomatic service will rely on ToR for security that’s madness... For the most part any country which can perform intelligence collection out of its embassy will have sufficient budget and and technical capacity to develop their own secure means of phoning home. The CIA has it's own onion service: ciadotgov4sjwlzihbbgxnqg3xiyrg7so2r2o3lt5wz5ypk4sxyjstad.onion Tor was developed by the US naval research lab, it was opened up because an anonymity network only spooks use isn't anonymous. Smart intelligence agencies are not going to reinvent the wheel (or in this case, the onion router). >A properly configured commercial or open source VPN is considerably more reliable and secure than ToR since you have no idea who is listening on the exit nodes If traffic is encrypted this does not matter. (HTTPS also provides integrity checking to show messages were not modified in transit) Also, traffic to onion services does not exit the Tor network - there is no "exit node" >Also for highly sensitive material a diplomatic pouch is still the most secure means of transport as it never leaves your sight and is never inspected and if you do get intercepted then destroying physical media is much easier than securing network traffic to the same level of assurance. They may use diplomatic pouches for especially sensitive information, but the need for low latency communication is strong. What's more likely is that one time pad codes for said communications are sent via pouch, and the communication itself then goes over Tor or some other channel.
- mikeash 7y ago
  Tor is an anonymizer. Why would embassies use an anonymizer for communicating back home? Everyone knows they’ll be communicating with home. There’s no point in hiding that. What you want to hide is the content of that communication, which Tor doesn’t do very well. You do that with standard encryption tools.
  - dontbenebby 7y ago
    Because if you don't know where traffic is going or coming from it's harder to infer what the message is about.
    - quonn 7y ago
      You properly encrypt it and regularly send data (like in a VPN). Done.
      - dontbenebby 7y ago
        So you're claiming that using a VPN makes correlation attacks impossible? Do you have any sources on this? I'd love to read up to better understand your thinking.
        theamk 7y ago
        Correlation attacks are attacing anonymity. If you are an embassy, there is no need for anonymity. Ok, an embassy connected to vpn.whitehouse.gov and sent 20 gb of data, so what? (unless you are thinking about high level things, like "lots of traffic" -> "something going on", but tor won't help with that either)
        dontbenebby 7y ago
        >unless you are thinking about high level things, like "lots of traffic" -> "something going on", but tor won't help with that either But is an embassy always only "phoning home"?
- dclusin 7y ago
  One time pads[1] are an effective and cheap measure. Certain privileged diplomatic luggage (not exactly sure of the protocols) cannot be searched by the host country. You can bring them to your embassies on a regular basis. 1 -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad
  - toxik 7y ago
    Or just set up an OTP then use the OTP to send new OTPs securely, boom.
    - theamk 7y ago
      If you do this, it is no longer OTP.
      - jancsika 7y ago
        I think it still is: 1. Alice and Bob set up their OTP 2. Alice randomly generates a new OTP 3. Alice encrypts the new OTP with the original OTP and sends the ciphertext to Bob 4. Bob decrypts... the new OTP 5. Alice and Bob burn the original OTP 6. Now Alice and Bob have a copy of the new OTP I mean, it's pointless. But I don't see how it isn't secure.
        theamk 7y ago
        For those who do not know exactly how OTP works: jancsika is right in the sense that this is possible, but meaningless. The reason for that is that in OTP, you use your key ("pad") for every transmission, in 1-to-1 ratio to amount of data being transmitted. And you can only use your key once (hence "one time pad") So let's say you brought 1000 MB of OTP keys to embassy in diplomatic mail, you can use it to send up to 1000 MB of encrypted data, and then you have to get a new one. If you are low on OTP keys, and you use it to send a new one, you'll have to spend 100 MB of "old" OTP keys to get 100 MB of "new" OTP keys -- entirely pointless process, as amount of unused key data won't change.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  Why do they need anything more than HTTPS? Just open https://nsa.gov/ https://nsa.gov/ and send your data.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Because that reveals that you are talking to the NSA right now. Sometimes the volume of chatter is useful information in its own right. Sure, you could script something to make the data rate constant, but that might be undesirably expensive and if you do everything over Tor then your video chat with HQ looks indistinguishable from you bit torrenting pirate episodes of My Little Pony.
    - MauranKilom 7y ago
      I can't currently find the place on Wikipedia where I learned this, but an example of "volume of chatter" being important was e.g. before the attack on pearl harbor. While the US couldn't decrypt the internal messages, it was clear that an attack was imminent based on the pattern (including the radio silence) before the attack.
- closeparen 7y ago
  Dedicated fibre, terrestrial radio, commercial and military satellite links. [0] Crypto algorithms implemented in hardware, keys managed by the signals intelligence agency. The Department of Defense is probably one the largest and most sophisticated telecoms in the world. Cannot have dependencies on local infrastructure in countries you are bombing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Information_System_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Information_System_Net...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
  The fact that the embassy talks to the mothership is not secret. How much it does so might be, and what it talks certainly is, but that's easily fixed by getting a line with dedicated bandwidth, running an encrypted connection (VPN or something custom) over it, and padding the traffic to ensure the bandwidth usage is constant (if you have a 100 Mbit line and 10 Mbit of traffic, you send 90 Mbit of padding). The keys for the VPN get delivered via diplomatic courier.
nameismypw 7y ago
1. Controlling the exit nodes doesn't mean anything unless they can use it to perform correlation attacks (because TLS, GPG, etc. Exit nodes are considered malicious regardless of who owns them.) 2. Using hidden services obviates the problem of exit nodes.
- badrabbit 7y ago
  Browser exploits and fingerprinting for when you get off Tor and use the same browser have been used in the past by exit nodes.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  Controlling just the exit nodes doesn't mean much, but by controlling the majority of all nodes you break TOR. If I controll all nodes your connection uses I can trivially deanonymize you (even if you use hidden services). It has also been shown multiple time that it is enough to control the first and the last node of the connection because timing correlation works great. The upside is that no government would admit to having this capability, so your only worries are extrajudicial measures (e.g. the US does plenty of extrajudicial killings of middle easterners with its drone program) and parallel construction.
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    Running Tor exit node is dangerous. Very few people would dare to do so. Most of hosters will forbid that. Now running ordinary Tor node is not dangerous. It does not consume a lot of resources (I'm running node on 256 MB OpenBSD VPS) and hosters don't care at all. It takes few minutes to install and set it up. So there's absolutely no reason for people not to run Tor node on every server they have access to. And I'm sure that many people do. So I doubt that government control majority of Tor nodes. If you operate a server, consider installing Tor node. It does no harm, it consumes as much of bandwidth as you will configure and you probably have a lot of unused resources anyway.
    - wongarsu 7y ago
      The flipside of that is that it's reasonable to assume that most (not government run) TOR nodes are run at hosters offering cheap small VPS with cheap traffic and high bandwidth. That gives a few select datacenters where sniffing and correlating network traffic is extremely beneficial for deanonymizing TOR traffic. And if the datacenter operator doesn't cooperate and isn't vulnerable to covert sniffing there are always their uplink providers.
AlphaSite 7y ago
I guess one benefit of this is only one country can control a majority of nodes.
- tgragnato 7y ago
  ... What about a group of countries?
  - owenmarshall 7y ago
    I can think of five (or should I say FVEY) that would have the combined means and interest.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  Perhaps other countries can use the same vulnerability or point of entry. Either way that one country can tip allies with valuable data.
Spooky23 7y ago
Tor was created for intelligence.
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  So what does the US Navy use now?
- lucb1e 7y ago
  "Against", not "for". It was against the enemy being able to get intelligence about communications. And it was also not created for an intelligence agency, in case what's how you meant it. I'm really not sure what you're trying to say here. If Tor was made for intelligence (agencies), why would anyone ever use it? Makes no sense.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    It was extensively funded by DARPA and the Navy and released to the public so that there would be other users. I’m not suggesting that the code of Tor is compromised, as it has been under the control of others for years. I am suggesting that military/intelligence interests have been associated with the network from the beginning and no doubt have significant presence in terms of infrastructure, etc.
creato 7y ago
I was pretty confused, because the title mentions "FSB", but all of this discussion in this thread is about the US. I literally assumed that FSB must be an acronym for some US intelligence agency I don't know of. Then I went and read the article, and it really is about the Russian FSB.
- some_random 7y ago
  The majority of people don't read the articles posted, only the titles. Most TLAs are American, so if you don't know what the FSB is then "a US IC org" is a pretty safe guess.
  - bigiain 7y ago
    I don't agree. I see that as a very US-centric view of the world. ASD CSE GCHQ GCSB NSA FVEY (I'm seriously considering getting some of those made as tshirts...) only one of FVEY is a US IC org. See also Nine Eyes and Fourteen Eyes.
- walshemj 7y ago
  You would have to avoided a lot of media and news not to know what the FSB is
- asveikau 7y ago
  A bunch of the comments are saying multiple governments and using lots of plurals. If you are reading such comments and assuming they only mean US I think you are misreading.
darawk 7y ago
What's interesting about this is that, in a competitive marketplace of governments attempting to do this...they'll actually make the network more secure.

onetimemanytime 7y ago

How do various embassies contact the mothership? I heard that a lot of them use TOR, and for smaller countries it makes sense. Big countries I suppose have their brew (which is not necessarily safer.)

Santosh83 7y ago
I'd be surprised if the big countries used plain Tor for their vital communication. They would be having their own secret networks or tunnel through Tor. Small countries have probably simply given up hiding their intelligence from the big ones at this point and are simply interested in ensuring their immediate rivals are kept out, which Tor can probably do.
- Paul-ish 7y ago
  A custom protocol can potentially be fingerprinted. I wouldn't be surprised if they used something less sophisticated. Like (encrypted) direct messages on twitter/reddit/facebook. This way the traffic blends with the rest.
  - nameismypw 7y ago
    There's a companion project to Tor called obs4proxy which is designed to hide the protocol's implementation.
  - kijin 7y ago
    It doesn't need to be a completely custom protocol. HTTPS can handle a very large percentage of anyone's communication needs these days.
    - Paul-ish 7y ago
      An application level protocol implemented on top of HTTPS can be fingerprinted. If you look up "Website Traffic Fingerprinting" you will see what I mean. That traffic is encrypted.
- closeparen 7y ago
  For official operations, they would not be using the internet in any way, but their own parallel enterprise networks. Tor could be useful for covert operatives, and for generally weakening the grip of governments where we are inducing "popular" uprisings.
dogma1138 7y ago
Not a single intelligence agency or diplomatic service will rely on ToR for security that’s madness. A properly configured commercial or open source VPN is considerably more reliable and secure than ToR since you have no idea who is listening on the exit nodes or who can execute unmasking attacks by traffic shaping or monitoring if they control enough relays. For the most part any country which can perform intelligence collection out of its embassy will have sufficient budget and and technical capacity to develop their own secure means of phoning home. Also for highly sensitive material a diplomatic pouch is still the most secure means of transport as it never leaves your sight and is never inspected and if you do get intercepted then destroying physical media is much easier than securing network traffic to the same level of assurance.
- seisvelas 7y ago
  Unless they communicate via a hidden service, in which case there is no exit node, so that particular problem is easy to avoid.
- dontbenebby 7y ago
  >Not a single intelligence agency or diplomatic service will rely on ToR for security that’s madness... For the most part any country which can perform intelligence collection out of its embassy will have sufficient budget and and technical capacity to develop their own secure means of phoning home. The CIA has it's own onion service: ciadotgov4sjwlzihbbgxnqg3xiyrg7so2r2o3lt5wz5ypk4sxyjstad.onion Tor was developed by the US naval research lab, it was opened up because an anonymity network only spooks use isn't anonymous. Smart intelligence agencies are not going to reinvent the wheel (or in this case, the onion router). >A properly configured commercial or open source VPN is considerably more reliable and secure than ToR since you have no idea who is listening on the exit nodes If traffic is encrypted this does not matter. (HTTPS also provides integrity checking to show messages were not modified in transit) Also, traffic to onion services does not exit the Tor network - there is no "exit node" >Also for highly sensitive material a diplomatic pouch is still the most secure means of transport as it never leaves your sight and is never inspected and if you do get intercepted then destroying physical media is much easier than securing network traffic to the same level of assurance. They may use diplomatic pouches for especially sensitive information, but the need for low latency communication is strong. What's more likely is that one time pad codes for said communications are sent via pouch, and the communication itself then goes over Tor or some other channel.
mikeash 7y ago
Tor is an anonymizer. Why would embassies use an anonymizer for communicating back home? Everyone knows they’ll be communicating with home. There’s no point in hiding that. What you want to hide is the content of that communication, which Tor doesn’t do very well. You do that with standard encryption tools.
- dontbenebby 7y ago
  Because if you don't know where traffic is going or coming from it's harder to infer what the message is about.
  - quonn 7y ago
    You properly encrypt it and regularly send data (like in a VPN). Done.
    - dontbenebby 7y ago
      So you're claiming that using a VPN makes correlation attacks impossible? Do you have any sources on this? I'd love to read up to better understand your thinking.
      - theamk 7y ago
        Correlation attacks are attacing anonymity. If you are an embassy, there is no need for anonymity. Ok, an embassy connected to vpn.whitehouse.gov and sent 20 gb of data, so what? (unless you are thinking about high level things, like "lots of traffic" -> "something going on", but tor won't help with that either)
        dontbenebby 7y ago
        >unless you are thinking about high level things, like "lots of traffic" -> "something going on", but tor won't help with that either But is an embassy always only "phoning home"?
dclusin 7y ago
One time pads[1] are an effective and cheap measure. Certain privileged diplomatic luggage (not exactly sure of the protocols) cannot be searched by the host country. You can bring them to your embassies on a regular basis. 1 -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad
- toxik 7y ago
  Or just set up an OTP then use the OTP to send new OTPs securely, boom.
  - theamk 7y ago
    If you do this, it is no longer OTP.
    - jancsika 7y ago
      I think it still is: 1. Alice and Bob set up their OTP 2. Alice randomly generates a new OTP 3. Alice encrypts the new OTP with the original OTP and sends the ciphertext to Bob 4. Bob decrypts... the new OTP 5. Alice and Bob burn the original OTP 6. Now Alice and Bob have a copy of the new OTP I mean, it's pointless. But I don't see how it isn't secure.
      - theamk 7y ago
        For those who do not know exactly how OTP works: jancsika is right in the sense that this is possible, but meaningless. The reason for that is that in OTP, you use your key ("pad") for every transmission, in 1-to-1 ratio to amount of data being transmitted. And you can only use your key once (hence "one time pad") So let's say you brought 1000 MB of OTP keys to embassy in diplomatic mail, you can use it to send up to 1000 MB of encrypted data, and then you have to get a new one. If you are low on OTP keys, and you use it to send a new one, you'll have to spend 100 MB of "old" OTP keys to get 100 MB of "new" OTP keys -- entirely pointless process, as amount of unused key data won't change.
vbezhenar 7y ago
Why do they need anything more than HTTPS? Just open https://nsa.gov/ https://nsa.gov/ and send your data.
- ben_w 7y ago
  Because that reveals that you are talking to the NSA right now. Sometimes the volume of chatter is useful information in its own right. Sure, you could script something to make the data rate constant, but that might be undesirably expensive and if you do everything over Tor then your video chat with HQ looks indistinguishable from you bit torrenting pirate episodes of My Little Pony.
  - MauranKilom 7y ago
    I can't currently find the place on Wikipedia where I learned this, but an example of "volume of chatter" being important was e.g. before the attack on pearl harbor. While the US couldn't decrypt the internal messages, it was clear that an attack was imminent based on the pattern (including the radio silence) before the attack.
closeparen 7y ago
Dedicated fibre, terrestrial radio, commercial and military satellite links. [0] Crypto algorithms implemented in hardware, keys managed by the signals intelligence agency. The Department of Defense is probably one the largest and most sophisticated telecoms in the world. Cannot have dependencies on local infrastructure in countries you are bombing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Information_System_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Information_System_Net...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
The fact that the embassy talks to the mothership is not secret. How much it does so might be, and what it talks certainly is, but that's easily fixed by getting a line with dedicated bandwidth, running an encrypted connection (VPN or something custom) over it, and padding the traffic to ensure the bandwidth usage is constant (if you have a 100 Mbit line and 10 Mbit of traffic, you send 90 Mbit of padding). The keys for the VPN get delivered via diplomatic courier.

nameismypw 7y ago

1. Controlling the exit nodes doesn't mean anything unless they can use it to perform correlation attacks (because TLS, GPG, etc. Exit nodes are considered malicious regardless of who owns them.) 2. Using hidden services obviates the problem of exit nodes.

badrabbit 7y ago
Browser exploits and fingerprinting for when you get off Tor and use the same browser have been used in the past by exit nodes.
wongarsu 7y ago
Controlling just the exit nodes doesn't mean much, but by controlling the majority of all nodes you break TOR. If I controll all nodes your connection uses I can trivially deanonymize you (even if you use hidden services). It has also been shown multiple time that it is enough to control the first and the last node of the connection because timing correlation works great. The upside is that no government would admit to having this capability, so your only worries are extrajudicial measures (e.g. the US does plenty of extrajudicial killings of middle easterners with its drone program) and parallel construction.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  Running Tor exit node is dangerous. Very few people would dare to do so. Most of hosters will forbid that. Now running ordinary Tor node is not dangerous. It does not consume a lot of resources (I'm running node on 256 MB OpenBSD VPS) and hosters don't care at all. It takes few minutes to install and set it up. So there's absolutely no reason for people not to run Tor node on every server they have access to. And I'm sure that many people do. So I doubt that government control majority of Tor nodes. If you operate a server, consider installing Tor node. It does no harm, it consumes as much of bandwidth as you will configure and you probably have a lot of unused resources anyway.
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    The flipside of that is that it's reasonable to assume that most (not government run) TOR nodes are run at hosters offering cheap small VPS with cheap traffic and high bandwidth. That gives a few select datacenters where sniffing and correlating network traffic is extremely beneficial for deanonymizing TOR traffic. And if the datacenter operator doesn't cooperate and isn't vulnerable to covert sniffing there are always their uplink providers.

AlphaSite 7y ago

I guess one benefit of this is only one country can control a majority of nodes.

tgragnato 7y ago
... What about a group of countries?
- owenmarshall 7y ago
  I can think of five (or should I say FVEY) that would have the combined means and interest.
Fnoord 7y ago
Perhaps other countries can use the same vulnerability or point of entry. Either way that one country can tip allies with valuable data.

Spooky23 7y ago

Tor was created for intelligence.

paulryanrogers 7y ago
So what does the US Navy use now?
lucb1e 7y ago
"Against", not "for". It was against the enemy being able to get intelligence about communications. And it was also not created for an intelligence agency, in case what's how you meant it. I'm really not sure what you're trying to say here. If Tor was made for intelligence (agencies), why would anyone ever use it? Makes no sense.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  It was extensively funded by DARPA and the Navy and released to the public so that there would be other users. I’m not suggesting that the code of Tor is compromised, as it has been under the control of others for years. I am suggesting that military/intelligence interests have been associated with the network from the beginning and no doubt have significant presence in terms of infrastructure, etc.

creato 7y ago

I was pretty confused, because the title mentions "FSB", but all of this discussion in this thread is about the US. I literally assumed that FSB must be an acronym for some US intelligence agency I don't know of. Then I went and read the article, and it really is about the Russian FSB.

some_random 7y ago
The majority of people don't read the articles posted, only the titles. Most TLAs are American, so if you don't know what the FSB is then "a US IC org" is a pretty safe guess.
- bigiain 7y ago
  I don't agree. I see that as a very US-centric view of the world. ASD CSE GCHQ GCSB NSA FVEY (I'm seriously considering getting some of those made as tshirts...) only one of FVEY is a US IC org. See also Nine Eyes and Fourteen Eyes.
walshemj 7y ago
You would have to avoided a lot of media and news not to know what the FSB is
asveikau 7y ago
A bunch of the comments are saying multiple governments and using lots of plurals. If you are reading such comments and assuming they only mean US I think you are misreading.

darawk 7y ago

What's interesting about this is that, in a competitive marketplace of governments attempting to do this...they'll actually make the network more secure.