8 ms·

Kind of highlights that in this age, it's not enough to say "I'm neutral." You need to be able to say "I can guarantee that I'm neutral." The difference is tha

Kind of highlights that in this age, it's not enough to say "I'm neutral." You need to be able to say "I can guarantee that I'm neutral." The difference is that the latter promise doesn't break when a malicious actor has access. Consider two VPNs, one of which promises never to misuse client-side IP data, while the other refuses to store that data in the first place. If both VPNs are infiltrated by a bad actor, the one that doesn't store data can guarantee slightly more privacy than the one that keeps data but promises not to use it. Similar case: I think it's interesting to note that German usage of Tor dropped off when the Snowden revelations took place, while many other countries experienced greater uptake. Perhaps they recognized that Tor may not be as secure as it's claimed to be -- especially considering who initially funded it. If you want an encryption product/service to be truly secure, you can't buy it on reputation alone. You have to think about where it came from and how it works.

slg 6y ago
>Kind of highlights that in this age, it's not enough to say "I'm neutral." You need to be able to say "I can guarantee that I'm neutral." >The difference is that the latter promise doesn't break when a malicious actor has access. Consider two VPNs, one of which promises never to misuse client-side IP data, while the other refuses to store that data in the first place. Why do you trust either company? Can you verify the claim that no data is logged intentionally or potentially even accidentally? Even companies that have been taken to court and shown an inability to produce logs in the past could have made recent changes behind the scenes that change this. There is a huge degree of information asymmetry when it comes to VPN providers and as a result you shouldn't completely trust them if logging is a make or break issue for you.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  I think it's important to be realistic about VPN's. They can't keep you safe from Nation State Adversaries. They can keep you safe from spiteful nobodies or smaller orgs.
  - Loughla 6y ago
    I don't know what it means, but I'm sure it's not good that my initial reaction to your statement was, "nothing can keep you safe from nation state adversaries."
    - rowanG077 6y ago
      Nuclear weapons ready to deploy can keep you pretty safe.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        https://twitter.com/bobvulfov/status/815103069339926528?lang=en https://twitter.com/bobvulfov/status/815103069339926528?lang...
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      It can be done; look at e.g. Mexican cartels.
      - effie 6y ago
        What serious nation state adversaries do cartels have?
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        The US government attacks them all the time. I would argue that Mexico is also a nation-state.
      - shadowprofile77 6y ago
        Living in Mexico here, the cartels in this country do indeed fight back against nation state adversaries (specifically the U.S government and the federal and state government forces of Mexico and its 30+ states where they operate) but the example of them as a model for just about any other organization is grotesquely mistaken. Here's why: For one thing, they partly resist by paying immense amounts of money in bribes to government and police officials at all levels of the Mexican state apparatus, and in some cases even to lower-mid level officials of the U.S government close to the border. This is not a policy for staying under the radar or being effective at a reasonable cost (unless you're moving billions in drugs and kidnapping money) Secondly, they depend to a large extent on a known capacity for incredibly psychotic, grotesque levels of violence to intimidate officials inside Mexico's chronically weak state institutions so that their activities can be left alone as much as possible. This requires a willingness to engage in violent criminality that few organizations in the world can match and it also involves the use of thousands of low-level foot soldiers armed to the teeth and recruited from immense pools of poverty-stricken populations (again, not applicable to many organizations or groups that just want to stay off the radar of nation state adversaries while doing their business.) Thirdly, despite all the above, the cartels are indeed under constant attack either among each other or from state level actors in Mexico and with U.S government pressure. Consequently, their attrition rate is monstrously high, with thousands, yes thousands, of their members dying hideously bloody deaths each year in endless gun battles with authorities and rivals. This is only sustainable due to the recruiting factors of my second point above and it's certainly no model for successfully evading nation state actors. They don't evade them much, they just keep feeding more "disposable" lives to them while a small leadership more or less staves off its own eventual death by bullet or supermax prison. As a final point, despite all of the above measures being in place, even the highly protected, wealthy leadership of these cartels eventually almost universally suffers its own extremely high attrition from state level actors: Seeing as how virtually every single major cartel boss that was running things a decade ago is now either dead or in prison, the long term prospects for any one of them are awful, despite all their money and localized power.
- rebuilder 6y ago
  And furthermore, if a company was persuaded or compelled to log data for an intelligence agency, they would likely not admit to it for just any court.
  - PradeetPatel 6y ago
    Not US citizen here. Is that even legal? I was under the impression that lying under oath would be considered a crime in most justice systems
    - 420official 6y ago
      A court can legally get an injunction that forces you to comply and keep your complicity secret. That's why "warrant canaries"[1] exist, a company will release a regular statement where they include a line like "We have never been forced to comply with the US federal government.". That way if it does happen they can simply remove the line from future releases to make it clear without violating an injuction. Unfortunately this doesn't get you any sort of specificity in terms of what happened with what data or why so it's a pretty crude method. Also a court could force you to keep that canary statement active which renders the whole thing moot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
      - jjones2 6y ago
        It's downright pathetic that we have to rely on things like warrant canaries in Western democracies. Obviously secret warrants, secret courts, black sites, etc have absolutely _no_ place in a civilized world. It creates a two-tiered justice system: us vs them.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      You also have to prove that the lie occurred. If there is no evidence that the data exists of anything more than a hope and a prayer, then you can't prove there was a lie.
    - pyuser583 6y ago
TYMorningCoffee 6y ago
> Kind of highlights that in this age, it's not enough to say "I'm neutral." You need to be able to say "I can guarantee that I'm neutral." I don't believe it's limited to this age. I think this is something that extends to all ages. Only the methods of implementing it have changed. During WW2 Switzerland again put comprehensive plans in place to gaurentee their neutrality (1). (1) How Switzerland Stayed Neutral https://youtu.be/YeAxxMZf1O4 https://youtu.be/YeAxxMZf1O4
segfaultbuserr 6y ago
> Kind of highlights that in this age, it's not enough to say "I'm neutral." You need to be able to say "I can guarantee that I'm neutral." > Consider two VPNs, one of which promises never to misuse client-side IP data, while the other refuses to store that data in the first place. If both VPNs are infiltrated by a bad actor, the one that doesn't store data can guarantee slightly more privacy than the one that keeps data but promises not to use it. > Similar case: I think it's interesting to note that German usage of Tor dropped off when the Snowden revelations took place, while many other countries experienced greater uptake. Perhaps they recognized that Tor may not be as secure as it's claimed to be -- especially considering who initially funded it. Your point is absolutely correct. Claiming security is useless, it should be guaranteed in some way from the properties of the system itself. However, I think VPN services are the worst offenders. The architecture of a VPN (single point of failure) itself guarantees that achievable privacy facing an attacker is decidedly bad. It's impossible 3rd-party to show whether a VPN provider is keeping logs, it has a verifiability of 0. Governments can issue a subpoena to the VPN provider to force it recording traffic. You don't even need to plant any backdoor or technically compromise the system. And historically, law enforcement agencies have successfully used subpoenas to arrest many people. On the other hand, Tor offers a much greater level of privacy guarantee that is better than all the large VPN providers, and this remains true regardless of who is funding Tor - unlike a VPN, you can't issue a subpoena to the Tor network, you must compromise the system technically using one way or another. This alone is already a good advantage. The architecture of Tor gives a clear map of exactly what can and cannot be compromised by whom. Since the protocol is publicly documented, we can know quite a lot of things. This list is not meant to be a exhaustive or comprehensive review, don't complain if something is missing, just to make a point on verification. * The 3-hop entry-middle-exit design with randomized selection and layered encryption offers robust guarantee of security and privacy. The protocols have been reviewed by many cryptographers and relevant researches are available in various journals. There's no crypto vulnerability at the protocol level, and architecturally, the biggest flaws are end-to-end correlation (but it's a problem in all low-latency anonymizing networks) and its inability to defend itself from a global adversary (a well-known limitation). Assuming there's no implementation vulnerabilities, the attacker must control a large number of Tor relays (The classic attack of deploying malicious exit nodes is only a special case) and/or monitor multiple Internet backbones to reliably monitor or anonymize users at considerable expense [0]. Sure, we can assume the NSA has the resources to do targeted attacks, but it's not possible to magically decrypt the traffic or obtain a list of IP addresses. Nevertheless, it's possible to do it to a VPN service and the barrier is close to 0. * Like VPN, law enforcement agencies have a record of arresting Tor users, but so far, the vast majority of attacks on the Tor networks that have been deployed in practice is browser exploits, software exploits, and social engineering. The fact that law enforcement agencies are exploiting the browser and userspace software rather than Tor indirectly proves that targeting the network itself is at least expensively. * Assuming that the NSA wants to sabotage the security of Tor, implementation vulnerabilities can be introduced, allowing the NSA to perform a "magic encryption/deanoymization", but it has a non-zero probability of detection by auditing its source code. Certainly, the question is whether someone is able to find it or not, but a VPN doesn't even give you a chance. * There are multiple (currently 8?) trusted authorities in the Tor network that officially certificates the system consensus (list of available Tor relays and their status). If the NSA can compromise 5 of them, forged lists of Tor relays can be distributed. But there's no evidence that it has happened [1] in the past 20 years, unless the NSA is doing an unimaginably good job to hide it, but then, the consensus data is public and archived, it's likely only to be a targeted attack). Overall, technically speaking, the architecture of Tor clearly offers quite a lot of technical guarantees that are significantly stronger than any VPN. Thus, I consider replacing Tor with a VPN (as in Germany) is mostly a bad idea. [0] But more and more new relays are running on AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean, Linode, this is a potential problem. [1] The closest call was the Debian's defective OpenSSL patch incident. Only 1 more vote was enough to control the network.

slg 6y ago

>Kind of highlights that in this age, it's not enough to say "I'm neutral." You need to be able to say "I can guarantee that I'm neutral." >The difference is that the latter promise doesn't break when a malicious actor has access. Consider two VPNs, one of which promises never to misuse client-side IP data, while the other refuses to store that data in the first place. Why do you trust either company? Can you verify the claim that no data is logged intentionally or potentially even accidentally? Even companies that have been taken to court and shown an inability to produce logs in the past could have made recent changes behind the scenes that change this. There is a huge degree of information asymmetry when it comes to VPN providers and as a result you shouldn't completely trust them if logging is a make or break issue for you.

im3w1l 6y ago
I think it's important to be realistic about VPN's. They can't keep you safe from Nation State Adversaries. They can keep you safe from spiteful nobodies or smaller orgs.
- Loughla 6y ago
  I don't know what it means, but I'm sure it's not good that my initial reaction to your statement was, "nothing can keep you safe from nation state adversaries."
  - rowanG077 6y ago
    Nuclear weapons ready to deploy can keep you pretty safe.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      https://twitter.com/bobvulfov/status/815103069339926528?lang=en https://twitter.com/bobvulfov/status/815103069339926528?lang...
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    It can be done; look at e.g. Mexican cartels.
    - effie 6y ago
      What serious nation state adversaries do cartels have?
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        The US government attacks them all the time. I would argue that Mexico is also a nation-state.
    - shadowprofile77 6y ago
      Living in Mexico here, the cartels in this country do indeed fight back against nation state adversaries (specifically the U.S government and the federal and state government forces of Mexico and its 30+ states where they operate) but the example of them as a model for just about any other organization is grotesquely mistaken. Here's why: For one thing, they partly resist by paying immense amounts of money in bribes to government and police officials at all levels of the Mexican state apparatus, and in some cases even to lower-mid level officials of the U.S government close to the border. This is not a policy for staying under the radar or being effective at a reasonable cost (unless you're moving billions in drugs and kidnapping money) Secondly, they depend to a large extent on a known capacity for incredibly psychotic, grotesque levels of violence to intimidate officials inside Mexico's chronically weak state institutions so that their activities can be left alone as much as possible. This requires a willingness to engage in violent criminality that few organizations in the world can match and it also involves the use of thousands of low-level foot soldiers armed to the teeth and recruited from immense pools of poverty-stricken populations (again, not applicable to many organizations or groups that just want to stay off the radar of nation state adversaries while doing their business.) Thirdly, despite all the above, the cartels are indeed under constant attack either among each other or from state level actors in Mexico and with U.S government pressure. Consequently, their attrition rate is monstrously high, with thousands, yes thousands, of their members dying hideously bloody deaths each year in endless gun battles with authorities and rivals. This is only sustainable due to the recruiting factors of my second point above and it's certainly no model for successfully evading nation state actors. They don't evade them much, they just keep feeding more "disposable" lives to them while a small leadership more or less staves off its own eventual death by bullet or supermax prison. As a final point, despite all of the above measures being in place, even the highly protected, wealthy leadership of these cartels eventually almost universally suffers its own extremely high attrition from state level actors: Seeing as how virtually every single major cartel boss that was running things a decade ago is now either dead or in prison, the long term prospects for any one of them are awful, despite all their money and localized power.
rebuilder 6y ago
And furthermore, if a company was persuaded or compelled to log data for an intelligence agency, they would likely not admit to it for just any court.
- PradeetPatel 6y ago
  Not US citizen here. Is that even legal? I was under the impression that lying under oath would be considered a crime in most justice systems
  - 420official 6y ago
    A court can legally get an injunction that forces you to comply and keep your complicity secret. That's why "warrant canaries"[1] exist, a company will release a regular statement where they include a line like "We have never been forced to comply with the US federal government.". That way if it does happen they can simply remove the line from future releases to make it clear without violating an injuction. Unfortunately this doesn't get you any sort of specificity in terms of what happened with what data or why so it's a pretty crude method. Also a court could force you to keep that canary statement active which renders the whole thing moot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
    - jjones2 6y ago
      It's downright pathetic that we have to rely on things like warrant canaries in Western democracies. Obviously secret warrants, secret courts, black sites, etc have absolutely _no_ place in a civilized world. It creates a two-tiered justice system: us vs them.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    You also have to prove that the lie occurred. If there is no evidence that the data exists of anything more than a hope and a prayer, then you can't prove there was a lie.
  - pyuser583 6y ago

TYMorningCoffee 6y ago

> Kind of highlights that in this age, it's not enough to say "I'm neutral." You need to be able to say "I can guarantee that I'm neutral." I don't believe it's limited to this age. I think this is something that extends to all ages. Only the methods of implementing it have changed. During WW2 Switzerland again put comprehensive plans in place to gaurentee their neutrality (1). (1) How Switzerland Stayed Neutral https://youtu.be/YeAxxMZf1O4 https://youtu.be/YeAxxMZf1O4

segfaultbuserr 6y ago

> Kind of highlights that in this age, it's not enough to say "I'm neutral." You need to be able to say "I can guarantee that I'm neutral." > Consider two VPNs, one of which promises never to misuse client-side IP data, while the other refuses to store that data in the first place. If both VPNs are infiltrated by a bad actor, the one that doesn't store data can guarantee slightly more privacy than the one that keeps data but promises not to use it. > Similar case: I think it's interesting to note that German usage of Tor dropped off when the Snowden revelations took place, while many other countries experienced greater uptake. Perhaps they recognized that Tor may not be as secure as it's claimed to be -- especially considering who initially funded it. Your point is absolutely correct. Claiming security is useless, it should be guaranteed in some way from the properties of the system itself. However, I think VPN services are the worst offenders. The architecture of a VPN (single point of failure) itself guarantees that achievable privacy facing an attacker is decidedly bad. It's impossible 3rd-party to show whether a VPN provider is keeping logs, it has a verifiability of 0. Governments can issue a subpoena to the VPN provider to force it recording traffic. You don't even need to plant any backdoor or technically compromise the system. And historically, law enforcement agencies have successfully used subpoenas to arrest many people. On the other hand, Tor offers a much greater level of privacy guarantee that is better than all the large VPN providers, and this remains true regardless of who is funding Tor - unlike a VPN, you can't issue a subpoena to the Tor network, you must compromise the system technically using one way or another. This alone is already a good advantage. The architecture of Tor gives a clear map of exactly what can and cannot be compromised by whom. Since the protocol is publicly documented, we can know quite a lot of things. This list is not meant to be a exhaustive or comprehensive review, don't complain if something is missing, just to make a point on verification. * The 3-hop entry-middle-exit design with randomized selection and layered encryption offers robust guarantee of security and privacy. The protocols have been reviewed by many cryptographers and relevant researches are available in various journals. There's no crypto vulnerability at the protocol level, and architecturally, the biggest flaws are end-to-end correlation (but it's a problem in all low-latency anonymizing networks) and its inability to defend itself from a global adversary (a well-known limitation). Assuming there's no implementation vulnerabilities, the attacker must control a large number of Tor relays (The classic attack of deploying malicious exit nodes is only a special case) and/or monitor multiple Internet backbones to reliably monitor or anonymize users at considerable expense [0]. Sure, we can assume the NSA has the resources to do targeted attacks, but it's not possible to magically decrypt the traffic or obtain a list of IP addresses. Nevertheless, it's possible to do it to a VPN service and the barrier is close to 0. * Like VPN, law enforcement agencies have a record of arresting Tor users, but so far, the vast majority of attacks on the Tor networks that have been deployed in practice is browser exploits, software exploits, and social engineering. The fact that law enforcement agencies are exploiting the browser and userspace software rather than Tor indirectly proves that targeting the network itself is at least expensively. * Assuming that the NSA wants to sabotage the security of Tor, implementation vulnerabilities can be introduced, allowing the NSA to perform a "magic encryption/deanoymization", but it has a non-zero probability of detection by auditing its source code. Certainly, the question is whether someone is able to find it or not, but a VPN doesn't even give you a chance. * There are multiple (currently 8?) trusted authorities in the Tor network that officially certificates the system consensus (list of available Tor relays and their status). If the NSA can compromise 5 of them, forged lists of Tor relays can be distributed. But there's no evidence that it has happened [1] in the past 20 years, unless the NSA is doing an unimaginably good job to hide it, but then, the consensus data is public and archived, it's likely only to be a targeted attack). Overall, technically speaking, the architecture of Tor clearly offers quite a lot of technical guarantees that are significantly stronger than any VPN. Thus, I consider replacing Tor with a VPN (as in Germany) is mostly a bad idea. [0] But more and more new relays are running on AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean, Linode, this is a potential problem. [1] The closest call was the Debian's defective OpenSSL patch incident. Only 1 more vote was enough to control the network.