5 ms·

If the network isn’t free and data is centralized, one day you think you have it all and the next you could have nothing. Tor pretends to be secure, but is dark

by _where 6y ago

If the network isn’t free and data is centralized, one day you think you have it all and the next you could have nothing. Tor pretends to be secure, but is dark and compromised. This project seems to understand that and wants to try again to fix via P2P in a way that has promise. The simple implementation of web forms is broken in today’s web. It’s an input field or other element styled as an input field that may or may not be grouped or in a form object, possibly generated dynamically. Websockets, timers, validations, ... it’s a huge PITA. The DOM is a freaking mess. It’s not there until it’s there, it’s detached, it’s shared. It’s been gangbanged so much, there’s no clear parent anymore. ECMAScript- which version and which interpretation should Babel translate for you, and would you like obscufation via webpack, and how about some source maps with that, so you can unobscufate to debug it? Yarn, requireJS, npm, and you need an end script tag, should it go in the body or the head? You know the page isn’t full loaded yet, and it won’t ever be. There, it’s done, until that timer goes off. Each element generated was just regenerated and the old ones are hidden, but the new ones have the same script with different references. Sorry, that was the old framework, use this one, it’s newer and this blog or survey says more people use it. For a P2P open data sharing network over https, the proxy could allow a request to get someone else down the path. Not everything is direct.

StavrosK 6y ago
How confident are we that Tor is compromised?
- cookiengineer 6y ago
  > How confident are we that Tor is compromised? Large scale actors (read: ISPs and government agencies) have a huge amount of entry and exit nodes. They can simply measure timestamps and stream bytesizes, which allows them to trace your IP and geolocation. They do not have to decrypt HTTPS traffic for that, because the order of those streams is pretty unique when it comes to target IPs and timestamps.
  - TehCorwiz 6y ago
    I was under the impression that Tor hidden services were still safe since they don't rely on exit nodes.
    - cookiengineer 6y ago
      Yes, hidden services are safe (well, no system is really safe). But if e.g. a hidden service includes a web resource from the clearnet, it can be traced. I was talking about the "using tor to anonymize my IP" use case, where exit nodes get a huge amount of traffic per session. In order to be really anon you would need a custom client side engine that randomizes the order of external resources, and pauses/resumes requests (given 206 or chunked encoding is supported), and/or introduces null bytes to have a different stream bytesize after TLS encryption is added.
      - anonymouszx 6y ago
        Hidden services are safer in the sense that your connection can't be deanonymized with the help of your third relay (which would have been an exit node in the case of a clearnet connection) but if the hidden service in question were to be a honeypot and your entrypoint (ISP or tor guard node) were to be monitored by the same entity (this second requirement also holds for clearnet connection monitoring BTW), it would be possible to deanonymize your connection to the hidden service. How easy it is to perform the traffic analysis would have to depend on the amount of data being transferred, if I had to guess, so downloading a video would probably be worse than browsing a plaintext forum like hackernews. But if we're talking about a honeypot, your browser could be easily tricked into downloading large-enough files even from a plaintext website (just add several megabytes of comments in the webpage source for instance). > In order to be really anon you would need a custom client side engine that randomizes the order of external resources, and pauses/resumes requests (given 206 or chunked encoding is supported), and/or introduces null bytes to have a different stream bytesize after TLS encryption is added. It's unclear to me how any of this helps avoid traffic analysis. I believe tor already pads data into 512-byte cells, which might help a little bit.
- _where 6y ago
  If you were interested in intelligence, and you wanted to maintain that pipeline of intelligence, would you give up that information? Act in plain sight and do good, and you’ll be ok.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  We aren't. This is mostly FUD.
anonymouszx 6y ago
> Tor pretends to be secure, but is dark and compromised. Citation needed. Please stop with the "tor is compromised" meme... and what do you even mean by "dark"? What the hell... Tor is by no means a perfect anonymity solution but it's to my knowledge the best we've got. It's certainly way better than a VPN or no anonymization at all. More specifically, tor anonymity is limited by the fact that it's low-latency. This is a fundamental limitation of any low-latency transport layer and not the fault of the tor developers or any obscure forces. In particular, if your attacker has control of both your entry point (your tor guard node or your ISP) and your exit point (tor exit node, or the tor hidden service or website you are connecting to) , it becomes possible to de-anonymize your connection (to the specific exit point in question) through traffic analysis. There's just no way around that for a network meant to transport real-time traffic (as opposed to plain data or email for instance). And yes, it stands to reason that various intelligence agencies will have invested in running exit nodes or entry nodes but this is just unavoidable. What you can do counteract this is to run your own nodes or to donate to (presumably) trustworthy node operators. I think it's also worth noting that although tor can by no means 100% guarantee that you will be free from government surveillance at all times, it does make mass surveillance more difficult and more error-prone, and to me that's the whole point. Furthermore, although government surveillance cannot be thwarted 100%, tor does make corporate surveillance basically impossible (assuming you can avoid browser fingerprinting; this is what the tor browser is for). All in all, I can't claim tor is perfect (because it can't be!) but the more people use it the better it gets and it's certainly better than anything else, so please stop spreading FUD and encourage people to use it instead. Also, it's unclear to me how Stealth helps at all with hiding the IP addresses of its participants... It claims to be "private" but the README doesn't say anything about network privacy...
- nullstyle 6y ago
  Their claims around privacy seem pretty hand-wavy to me; I’d love to be wrong. As an example, their usage of DNS is simply DNS-over-HTTPS against the big public resolvers in a round-robin fashion: https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth/blob/X0/stealth/source/connection/DNS.mjs https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth/blob/X0/stealth/s... The code doesn’t strike me as concerning itself with protecting privacy so much as changing who will get to log your traffic. Interesting effort though; I’ll hope for more details from them in the future!

by _where 6y ago

StavrosK 6y ago

How confident are we that Tor is compromised?

cookiengineer 6y ago
> How confident are we that Tor is compromised? Large scale actors (read: ISPs and government agencies) have a huge amount of entry and exit nodes. They can simply measure timestamps and stream bytesizes, which allows them to trace your IP and geolocation. They do not have to decrypt HTTPS traffic for that, because the order of those streams is pretty unique when it comes to target IPs and timestamps.
- TehCorwiz 6y ago
  I was under the impression that Tor hidden services were still safe since they don't rely on exit nodes.
  - cookiengineer 6y ago
    Yes, hidden services are safe (well, no system is really safe). But if e.g. a hidden service includes a web resource from the clearnet, it can be traced. I was talking about the "using tor to anonymize my IP" use case, where exit nodes get a huge amount of traffic per session. In order to be really anon you would need a custom client side engine that randomizes the order of external resources, and pauses/resumes requests (given 206 or chunked encoding is supported), and/or introduces null bytes to have a different stream bytesize after TLS encryption is added.
    - anonymouszx 6y ago
      Hidden services are safer in the sense that your connection can't be deanonymized with the help of your third relay (which would have been an exit node in the case of a clearnet connection) but if the hidden service in question were to be a honeypot and your entrypoint (ISP or tor guard node) were to be monitored by the same entity (this second requirement also holds for clearnet connection monitoring BTW), it would be possible to deanonymize your connection to the hidden service. How easy it is to perform the traffic analysis would have to depend on the amount of data being transferred, if I had to guess, so downloading a video would probably be worse than browsing a plaintext forum like hackernews. But if we're talking about a honeypot, your browser could be easily tricked into downloading large-enough files even from a plaintext website (just add several megabytes of comments in the webpage source for instance). > In order to be really anon you would need a custom client side engine that randomizes the order of external resources, and pauses/resumes requests (given 206 or chunked encoding is supported), and/or introduces null bytes to have a different stream bytesize after TLS encryption is added. It's unclear to me how any of this helps avoid traffic analysis. I believe tor already pads data into 512-byte cells, which might help a little bit.
_where 6y ago
If you were interested in intelligence, and you wanted to maintain that pipeline of intelligence, would you give up that information? Act in plain sight and do good, and you’ll be ok.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
We aren't. This is mostly FUD.

anonymouszx 6y ago

> Tor pretends to be secure, but is dark and compromised. Citation needed. Please stop with the "tor is compromised" meme... and what do you even mean by "dark"? What the hell... Tor is by no means a perfect anonymity solution but it's to my knowledge the best we've got. It's certainly way better than a VPN or no anonymization at all. More specifically, tor anonymity is limited by the fact that it's low-latency. This is a fundamental limitation of any low-latency transport layer and not the fault of the tor developers or any obscure forces. In particular, if your attacker has control of both your entry point (your tor guard node or your ISP) and your exit point (tor exit node, or the tor hidden service or website you are connecting to) , it becomes possible to de-anonymize your connection (to the specific exit point in question) through traffic analysis. There's just no way around that for a network meant to transport real-time traffic (as opposed to plain data or email for instance). And yes, it stands to reason that various intelligence agencies will have invested in running exit nodes or entry nodes but this is just unavoidable. What you can do counteract this is to run your own nodes or to donate to (presumably) trustworthy node operators. I think it's also worth noting that although tor can by no means 100% guarantee that you will be free from government surveillance at all times, it does make mass surveillance more difficult and more error-prone, and to me that's the whole point. Furthermore, although government surveillance cannot be thwarted 100%, tor does make corporate surveillance basically impossible (assuming you can avoid browser fingerprinting; this is what the tor browser is for). All in all, I can't claim tor is perfect (because it can't be!) but the more people use it the better it gets and it's certainly better than anything else, so please stop spreading FUD and encourage people to use it instead. Also, it's unclear to me how Stealth helps at all with hiding the IP addresses of its participants... It claims to be "private" but the README doesn't say anything about network privacy...

nullstyle 6y ago
Their claims around privacy seem pretty hand-wavy to me; I’d love to be wrong. As an example, their usage of DNS is simply DNS-over-HTTPS against the big public resolvers in a round-robin fashion: https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth/blob/X0/stealth/source/connection/DNS.mjs https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth/blob/X0/stealth/s... The code doesn’t strike me as concerning itself with protecting privacy so much as changing who will get to log your traffic. Interesting effort though; I’ll hope for more details from them in the future!