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It would have absolutely prevented this person from getting identified. It looks like some kids doing a climate protest. I can't but help read your post in com

It would have absolutely prevented this person from getting identified. It looks like some kids doing a climate protest. I can't but help read your post in comic book guys voice.

dredmorbius 5y ago
In comic-book voice, then: what would an intelligence agency or police force's response to a suspect known to be using Tor be? Traffic analysis, at a cost, could establish that the suspect is using Tor. TorMetrics shows slightly more than 1,250 currently-running Tor exit nodes. I'll presume this is typical, history shows it's pretty consisten over the past 3 months. https://metrics.torproject.org/relayflags.html?start=2021-06-08&end=2021-09-06&flag=Exit https://metrics.torproject.org/relayflags.html?start=2021-06... I'm going to presume that a court could conceivably issue an order to log all Tor-based traffic. A state actor / APT might then be able to correlate a known IP and traffic at a given point in time with other data to identify a source IP. This might be combined with other measures to encourage circuit-jumping until the suspect is on a specific known or monitored Tor circuit. Yes, costs increase. I don't see this as technically infeasible, however. Might not be rolled out just for a house-squatter, however.
- seg_lol 5y ago
  Yeah, what you outline means Tor is Swiss cheese (ha, ha, long game pun), when it comes to traffic analysis. Are all the IPs for Paris to Tor being logged at the ISP level? You bet! Frankly, I don't think anyone is safe from the tip of a nation state, even small ones. But I do think we should protect everyone else and Tor would have done that. Because this was clearly civil disobedience and that is what we really should be protecting. https://www.cactusvpn.com/vpn/is-tor-safe/ https://www.cactusvpn.com/vpn/is-tor-safe/
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Agreed on goals. Tor undoubtedly helps, and even where it fails, the raised costs are themselves a win for the pro-privacy crowd. Just ... don't think it's a majykal bullet. It's not. Tradecraft matters, vulnerabilities exist. Examine and review your threat models.

It would have absolutely prevented this person from getting identified. It looks like some kids doing a climate protest. I can't but help read your post in comic book guys voice.

dredmorbius 5y ago

In comic-book voice, then: what would an intelligence agency or police force's response to a suspect known to be using Tor be? Traffic analysis, at a cost, could establish that the suspect is using Tor. TorMetrics shows slightly more than 1,250 currently-running Tor exit nodes. I'll presume this is typical, history shows it's pretty consisten over the past 3 months. https://metrics.torproject.org/relayflags.html?start=2021-06-08&end=2021-09-06&flag=Exit https://metrics.torproject.org/relayflags.html?start=2021-06... I'm going to presume that a court could conceivably issue an order to log all Tor-based traffic. A state actor / APT might then be able to correlate a known IP and traffic at a given point in time with other data to identify a source IP. This might be combined with other measures to encourage circuit-jumping until the suspect is on a specific known or monitored Tor circuit. Yes, costs increase. I don't see this as technically infeasible, however. Might not be rolled out just for a house-squatter, however.

seg_lol 5y ago
Yeah, what you outline means Tor is Swiss cheese (ha, ha, long game pun), when it comes to traffic analysis. Are all the IPs for Paris to Tor being logged at the ISP level? You bet! Frankly, I don't think anyone is safe from the tip of a nation state, even small ones. But I do think we should protect everyone else and Tor would have done that. Because this was clearly civil disobedience and that is what we really should be protecting. https://www.cactusvpn.com/vpn/is-tor-safe/ https://www.cactusvpn.com/vpn/is-tor-safe/
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Agreed on goals. Tor undoubtedly helps, and even where it fails, the raised costs are themselves a win for the pro-privacy crowd. Just ... don't think it's a majykal bullet. It's not. Tradecraft matters, vulnerabilities exist. Examine and review your threat models.