3 ms·

> If nodes are expensive, doesn't nsa have more money than any given privacy focused individual or organizing? So, two things are going on in this question. T

by saurik 5y ago

> If nodes are expensive, doesn't nsa have more money than any given privacy focused individual or organizing? So, two things are going on in this question. The first is that I doubt KAX17 is the NSA... they might not even be a government! Most systems people build that rely on altruism are so easily attacked that a grad student can take control of them using resources at a University. I appreciate that the bar to prevent the NSA (or the CCP, or whatever other government surveillance network you are most concerned about) taking over your network is high, but the bar right now is just so low for most of these protocols that it should be embarrassing. If the NSA were really the only problem for Tor, I'd call that "a wild success". The second, though, is that the goal should be to get big enough that the NSA would actually have a hard time dominating the resources of the pool. This requires being pretty large, but isn't insanely impossible. Let's look at Bitcoin for a moment: I am one of the first people to agree that "proof of work is probably an immoral way to solve this problem" (due to the externalized environmental effects of electricity usage and the such), but damn if it isn't effective, right? Bitcoin uses 0.5% of the world's electricity. That means to take control of half the Bitcoin network, the NSA would have to build out the infrastructure for buying (and using) an equivalent amount of the world's electricity... I bet that's hard, even for them.

theamk 5y ago
Sorry, you are not going to get big enough . Take a look at https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/ - you basically need to be top 5 to be too expensive for NSA to attack. And if your network is not in the top 20, it will cost single dollars per hour to attack, putting it within regular team's reach.
- saurik 5y ago
  FWIW, my personal belief is that when the dust settles in another decade there will only be a metaphorical oligopoly of distributed systems, each of which having generalized in their purposes in order to have "shared security" across a number of different use cases. Regardless, I maintain that Tor doesn't protect against the NSA today (and for even more reasons than come from this article today: the NSA can do attacks that don't even require running nodes, involving stuff like timing analysis attacks that Tor does nothing to prevent), so focusing on the NSA seems like a pointless exercise.
cycomanic 5y ago
> > If nodes are expensive, doesn't nsa have more money than any given privacy focused individual or organizing? > So, two things are going on in this question. > The first is that I doubt KAX17 is the NSA... they might not even be a government! The author suspects differently, he does suspect a state actor behind KAX17. Do you have better Information? > Most systems people build that rely on altruism are so easily attacked that a grad student can take control of them using resources at a University. KAX17 at times had bandwidth capabilities of 150 Gbit/s that is getting awfully close to the full bandwidth of the uni and would get noticed and shutdown pretty quickly. You seem to ignore the fact that running nodes with this capabilities requires significant resources. >I appreciate that the bar to prevent the NSA (or the CCP, or whatever other government surveillance network you are most concerned about) taking over your network is high, but the bar right now is just so low for most of these protocols that it should be embarrassing. If the NSA were really the only problem for Tor, I'd call that "a wild success". > The second, though, is that the goal should be to get big enough that the NSA would actually have a hard time dominating the resources of the pool. This requires being pretty large, but isn't insanely impossible. So your solution is "we just need to be big enough"? In that case are you not solving a non problem? If the tor network was big enough all this wouldn't be an issue, no need for any crypto currency constructs. >Let's look at Bitcoin for a moment: I am one of the first people to agree that "proof of work is probably an immoral way to solve this problem" (due to the externalized environmental effects of electricity usage and the such), but damn if it isn't effective, right? Effective at what? Keeping the NSA out? I suspect the NSA (as well as many others) have a good idea about a significant portion of bitcoin ownership. Also mining is highly concentrated, and there isn't even really an incentive for state agencies to try to control it. > Bitcoin uses 0.5% of the world's electricity. That means to take control of half the Bitcoin network, the NSA would have to build out the infrastructure for buying (and using) an equivalent amount of the world's electricity... I bet that's hard, even for them. Rr
- saurik 5y ago
  > The author suspects differently, he does suspect a state actor behind KAX17. Do you have better Information? FWIW, I also expect them to be a government... but not the NSA. They might not even be a government, though. > KAX17 at times had bandwidth capabilities of 150 Gbit/s that is getting awfully close to the full bandwidth of the uni and would get noticed and shutdown pretty quickly. You can do this with a botnet of a mere few thousand cable modems, which means that people like me (look into who I am if you haven't) can pull this in our spare time... it just requires being a bit evil, which these people almost certainly are. > You seem to ignore the fact that running nodes with this capabilities requires significant resources. No: I just have a realistic model of how large Tor is, which is "ridiculously small". > If the tor network was big enough all this wouldn't be an issue, no need for any crypto currency constructs. So, I did cover the things Tor has right now to get this kind of scaling, and while they aren't insane they are clearly precarious: they rely on the scarcity of IPv4 addresses and manual curation by a very small cabal of people whom I would not trust to protect anyone if actually threatened running on a handful of hopefully-secure machines. If you correctly discount the weight of these precarious solutions, the size of Tor doesn't matter. If you want to build a system where it costs a lot to register a node, you don't do "proof of IPv4"--which might not make sense at all in the future and is easy to forge--you just do something as close as possible to "proof of a giant pile of cash", as that will always have value and always be difficult to obtain in quantity. > Effective at what? Keeping the NSA out? I suspect the NSA (as well as many others) have a good idea about a significant portion of bitcoin ownership. I don't understand this... maybe you are trying to draw some haphazard analogy mapping to anonymity networks? What Bitcoin provides is a distributed ledger, and having a sizable control of it isn't about deanonymization but about delinearization: if you own more than 50% of Bitcoin you can reorder recent transactions (which lets you buy something expensive and then undo the transaction). You have to analyze these systems by what they intend to provide based on maintaining their trusted subset.

by saurik 5y ago

theamk 5y ago

Sorry, you are not going to get big enough . Take a look at https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/ - you basically need to be top 5 to be too expensive for NSA to attack. And if your network is not in the top 20, it will cost single dollars per hour to attack, putting it within regular team's reach.

saurik 5y ago
FWIW, my personal belief is that when the dust settles in another decade there will only be a metaphorical oligopoly of distributed systems, each of which having generalized in their purposes in order to have "shared security" across a number of different use cases. Regardless, I maintain that Tor doesn't protect against the NSA today (and for even more reasons than come from this article today: the NSA can do attacks that don't even require running nodes, involving stuff like timing analysis attacks that Tor does nothing to prevent), so focusing on the NSA seems like a pointless exercise.

cycomanic 5y ago

> > If nodes are expensive, doesn't nsa have more money than any given privacy focused individual or organizing? > So, two things are going on in this question. > The first is that I doubt KAX17 is the NSA... they might not even be a government! The author suspects differently, he does suspect a state actor behind KAX17. Do you have better Information? > Most systems people build that rely on altruism are so easily attacked that a grad student can take control of them using resources at a University. KAX17 at times had bandwidth capabilities of 150 Gbit/s that is getting awfully close to the full bandwidth of the uni and would get noticed and shutdown pretty quickly. You seem to ignore the fact that running nodes with this capabilities requires significant resources. >I appreciate that the bar to prevent the NSA (or the CCP, or whatever other government surveillance network you are most concerned about) taking over your network is high, but the bar right now is just so low for most of these protocols that it should be embarrassing. If the NSA were really the only problem for Tor, I'd call that "a wild success". > The second, though, is that the goal should be to get big enough that the NSA would actually have a hard time dominating the resources of the pool. This requires being pretty large, but isn't insanely impossible. So your solution is "we just need to be big enough"? In that case are you not solving a non problem? If the tor network was big enough all this wouldn't be an issue, no need for any crypto currency constructs. >Let's look at Bitcoin for a moment: I am one of the first people to agree that "proof of work is probably an immoral way to solve this problem" (due to the externalized environmental effects of electricity usage and the such), but damn if it isn't effective, right? Effective at what? Keeping the NSA out? I suspect the NSA (as well as many others) have a good idea about a significant portion of bitcoin ownership. Also mining is highly concentrated, and there isn't even really an incentive for state agencies to try to control it. > Bitcoin uses 0.5% of the world's electricity. That means to take control of half the Bitcoin network, the NSA would have to build out the infrastructure for buying (and using) an equivalent amount of the world's electricity... I bet that's hard, even for them. Rr

saurik 5y ago
> The author suspects differently, he does suspect a state actor behind KAX17. Do you have better Information? FWIW, I also expect them to be a government... but not the NSA. They might not even be a government, though. > KAX17 at times had bandwidth capabilities of 150 Gbit/s that is getting awfully close to the full bandwidth of the uni and would get noticed and shutdown pretty quickly. You can do this with a botnet of a mere few thousand cable modems, which means that people like me (look into who I am if you haven't) can pull this in our spare time... it just requires being a bit evil, which these people almost certainly are. > You seem to ignore the fact that running nodes with this capabilities requires significant resources. No: I just have a realistic model of how large Tor is, which is "ridiculously small". > If the tor network was big enough all this wouldn't be an issue, no need for any crypto currency constructs. So, I did cover the things Tor has right now to get this kind of scaling, and while they aren't insane they are clearly precarious: they rely on the scarcity of IPv4 addresses and manual curation by a very small cabal of people whom I would not trust to protect anyone if actually threatened running on a handful of hopefully-secure machines. If you correctly discount the weight of these precarious solutions, the size of Tor doesn't matter. If you want to build a system where it costs a lot to register a node, you don't do "proof of IPv4"--which might not make sense at all in the future and is easy to forge--you just do something as close as possible to "proof of a giant pile of cash", as that will always have value and always be difficult to obtain in quantity. > Effective at what? Keeping the NSA out? I suspect the NSA (as well as many others) have a good idea about a significant portion of bitcoin ownership. I don't understand this... maybe you are trying to draw some haphazard analogy mapping to anonymity networks? What Bitcoin provides is a distributed ledger, and having a sizable control of it isn't about deanonymization but about delinearization: if you own more than 50% of Bitcoin you can reorder recent transactions (which lets you buy something expensive and then undo the transaction). You have to analyze these systems by what they intend to provide based on maintaining their trusted subset.