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Thousands of Tor exit nodes attacked cryptocurrency users over the past year
- tootahe45 5y agoStopped taking tor seriously when i read one of these attackers controlled something like 30% of exit nodes around 1-2 years ago. Just makes you wonder whether the rest are govt hosted given there are no incentives for anybody to host a node. Another reason i don't trust TOR is that on the TOR subreddit they always tell you not to use a VPN before TOR, which just seems very suspect given there is only upside to doing this (VPN only sees what your ISP would've seen unless the vpn client is malware).
- tyingq 5y ago"there are no incentives to host a node." Agreed. There are even pretty strong disincentives from a legal standpoint.
- readflaggedcomm 5y agoThe Tor project's published a FAQ on it, in fact: https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/eff-tor-legal-faq/ https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/e... and the only bright spot is the claim that section 230 will protect exit relays, though political winds seem set against that.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago>there are no incentives for anybody to host a node. Sounds like you kids need an anonymous decentralized cryptocurrency powering your tor nodes with rewards for doing so. But everyone here hates crypto so I’ll just be over here sipping my Monero tea.
- enumjorge 5y agoI don’t think people here dislike crypto for its stated goals, but because current implementations don’t live up to those goals and have some serious defects. The hype doesn’t match the reality, which makes crypto feel more like a speculative market than a solution to a problem.
- Siira 5y agoThings take time. Which industry matured that quickly? Anyhow, stuff like Monero are actively suppressed by regulation and central exchanges. That's a political problem.
- trompetenaccoun 5y agoMonero is just a digital currency anyway, similar to Bitcoin if Bitcoin had cheap transactions. You can hardly run anything on the network. Something like Ethereum might be an option once it scales properly and when transaction costs come down. I do agree there needs to be a financial incentive to run nodes. A blockchain which does not discriminate in terms of applications running on it could be very valuable in the future. Privacy is important, not just from a civil rights point of view but for businesses too. There's a reason corporations care about IT security and encryption.
- Dunedan 5y agoThere was a pretty nice project a few years ago, awarding Bitcoin to Tor node operators called Oniontip [1]. All Tor operators had to do was to add a Bitcoin address to their Tor contact info. Donors would transfer Bitcoin to a Oniontip-operated Bitcoin address and Oniontip would regularly pay out the Tor operators proportional to the bandwidth they provided to Tor. That did work remarkably well, but unfortunately the author lost interest at some point and took the whole project down. [1]: https://github.com/DonnchaC/oniontip https://github.com/DonnchaC/oniontip
- nerdponx 5y agoHow would you "prove" that someone is hosting a non-malicious node? I assume it can be done (cf gridcoin, filecoin, namecoin).
- chayleaf 5y agoIt needs to be verifiable to be protected from spoofing, and encrypted to be protected from listening. You can't verify arbitrary network traffic because servers aren't stateless, but you can encrypt some traffic (https). Sadly, the encrypted traffic still has some metadata, such as server ip, sometimes hostname, request size. Either way, it can't be protected in the way filecoin/gridcoin are protected.
- remram 5y agoI think the idea was to reward all exit nodes, to provide an incentive for doing so that doesn't involve malicious behavior. Hopefully that would drown the malicious nodes in a sea of non-malicious operators who are here for the cryptocurrency rewards. Of course a way to prove you are not malicious would be great but I don't see how you can prove that using technology.
- meowface 5y agoI think HN is generally positive towards Monero.
- disposekinetics 5y agoWouldn't the possession/spending of that currency strongly imply I run a node? I think it might be self-defeating.
- remram 5y agoCan you host an exit node anonymously? I would assume it's not much better than the privacy offered by Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies.
- fragileone 5y agoI believe Orchid [1] was one of the first decentralised VPNs to have multi-hop, but I'm not sure if it uses onion routing. [1] https://www.orchid.com/ https://www.orchid.com/
- mumblemumble 5y agoOK, I'm curious, how would this work out in practice? The first reservation that comes to mind for me is concerns about crypto ledgers being more pseudonymous than anonymous. If I start using a cryptocurrency to tip exit node operators, that creates an immutable, publicly visible paper trail linking my presence on TOR back to me. Not exactly the kind of thing I'd be eager to sign up for if I'm trying to hide my tracks. It also moves things toward a situation where digital privacy is reserved for people who can afford to pay for it, which strikes me as running directly counter to the principles the TOR project is supposed to be upholding.
- vbezhenar 5y agoI can't even access TOR without VPN, because it's blocked in my country. My government makes sure our citizens use the best security practices to access the Internet. Very nice.
- jazu 5y agoI hosted a node which moved a hefty amount of traffic. Tor and the EFF sent me several T-shirts even. Then Tor decided they would label themselves a “human rights project” and started to go full political. I shut down my node forever.
- cyphar 5y agoThere are only a handful of things I can think of that are more political than creating software which allows people to access the internet freely and anonymously, in many cases against the wishes of their government. (Also the EFF is literally a political organisation and has described itself as a civil rights organisation since its formation in 1990.)
- capableweb 5y agoOn the opposite side, I didn't start hosting a couple of tor exit- and normal nodes until Tor labelled themselves a "human rights project".
- mumblemumble 5y agoIt's kind of interesting to see an apparent expression of pleasure at receiving a T-shirt from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, followed immediately by an expression of disdain about political missions. I'm pretty sure that, if you asked a random EFF board member, they would tell you that digital rights are largely just the application of human rights principles to the digital domain.
- gruez 5y ago>Then Tor decided they would label themselves a “human rights project” and started to go full political Why is this bad? Branding yourself as a human rights project garners way more sympathy than having the implied branding of "we help cybercriminals cover their tracks". In an age where encryption and privacy is under constant attack, having the public be on your side is very important.
- mhh__ 5y agoGod damn human rights...
- throwitaway12 5y agoYou are completely correct about the nodes being run for all sorts of nefarious reasons. Although, there are a small number of nodes rub by enthusiastic individuals but it's rare. Reddit has tons of actors spreading disinfo especially about VPN's never trust the info from there without serious vetting.
- worldofmatthew 5y agoNo, many tor nodes are run for good purposes. in fact, many of the largest networks are non-profits dedicated to running the nodes.
- worldofmatthew 5y agoI think it is mostly to avoid people using the same VPN across mobile and desktop and having both having a common end-point.
- batch12 5y agoI think their point about VPN is that a third party provider then could be compelled to disclose information about you. Since all your traffic routed through a single provider before hitting the remote proxy, there is now the potential for a single point of collection. When using Tor only, traffic leaving your computer is encrypted before hitting the first node which mitigates this threat. If the use of Tor is illegal for you, a VPN makes sense to hide its use-- but like you said, it is only hidden from the ISP. The VPN provider can still see that you are using it. In practice, how Tor is used should depend on the threat a person is trying to defend against.
- im3w1l 5y ago> third party provider then could be compelled to disclose information about you. What data exactly are you worried they would disclose? Everything they see would be encrypted, no?
- batch12 5y agoI am not worried. I was simply explaining the argument as I understood it.
- zionic 5y agoVPN hardens against your local ISP knowing when you are and are not using Tor, which is important meta data and has been used to identify people in the past.
- batch12 5y agoTrue, but the ISP knows you are using VPN and the VPN provider knows you are using Tor. Thats why I made the argument that the stategy of defense depends on the use case.
- jl2718 5y agoNonsense or terrible design. The VPN shouldn’t be able to read anything sent to a tor node. There are easy ways to detect a key exchange intercept with a trusted certificate authority, and probably also with no trusted authority.
- LatteLazy 5y agoForgive my ignorance but why does it matter who controls exit nodes? Unless you identify yourself on the clearnet an exit node operator can't identify you can they? Like you, I imagine plenty of governments run exit nodes just to see what's happening and keep the system working for their own uses.
- DSingularity 5y agoIf they control the relay and the exit mode then they can force http and mount MITM attacks on subsequent traffic of the user didn’t notice. This allows them to replace the destination address with their address and the user will be robbed of his cryptocurrency.
- swiley 5y agoYeah you really shouldn't generally be using TOR to browse the clear net if you're worried about attacks from a national government.
- tyingq 5y agoSeems unsurprising. An ecosystem where you can volunteer to be a MITM ends up having malicious MITM.
- mimi89999 5y agoWhy is this an issue? Most websites support HTTPS. It should be required and impossible to disable. Other malicious actors could also be running such attacks even at a much smaller scale.
- hartator 5y agoYou only one or two to not notice the http instead of https to make it a profitable attack.
- FatalLogic 5y agoIn this case, I think if the user makes an HTTP connection to a site, even if the site is HTTPS only, the attacker can intercept it, and man-in-the-middle it or pose as the legitimate site edit: and, the reason it's an issue is not because these systems and networks don't have strong secure communication options available, but because if there is any potential security hole at all, some users will fall into it
- mrslave 5y agoGood explanation. Firefox has had `dom.security.https_only_mode` for a while and it's amazing.
- sabellito 5y agoHow would that work? To my understanding https prevents mitm attacks.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoIt does. But it doesn't protect against: User → HTTP connection → [INTERCEPTION] → HTTPS connection → website.
- thrwaeasddsaf 5y agoThat assumes you're using https in the first place. Try enter openbsd.org in your browser and see whether you get the https site or not.
- mimi89999 5y agoMalicious Tor exits should not be an issue. Tor is for anonimity and protects your identity. Enforce HTTPS to protect against MITM.
- devwastaken 5y agoTor is not anonymous if the relays and hidden service work together. Given the cost of hosting and the significant funding put into this by the U.S. it's just a matter of probability before the deanon cannon aligns to a user.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bluedino 5y agoMy manager started playing around with crypto trading, at work, on his work PC…it’s amazing how many alarms it sets off on our Fortigate.
- capableweb 5y agoUnless you're talking about interacting directly with DeFi stuff via a standalone Ethereum node, isn't those alarms just based on a DNS and IP blocklist?
- mnahkies 5y agoI had a fun one a few years back - the company it guy pulled me aside and then with a lot of hesitation/beating around the bush told me that someone on my team had been mining crypto at work and that they would have to format their machine and disrupt their day as a result. Never felt so much relief to hear the world "crypto" as the delivery of the message had me confused and fearing bad things. When I spoke to the person about it turns out they'd started mining on their own hardware as a hobby and were just curious what the perf diff would be on the work computer's