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Your ISP et al may not easily observe the contents of your Tor traffic, but if I’m not mistaken, the usage of Tor itself is easily detected and can have you fla

Your ISP et al may not easily observe the contents of your Tor traffic, but if I’m not mistaken, the usage of Tor itself is easily detected and can have you flagged for further scrutiny. I’ve always seen this as a weakness of Tor. It would be nice if it had the bandwidth to be a default for e.g. Firefox which would solve this problem.

mayankkaizen 5y ago
I've never used Tor and practically know nothing about it. But I always wondered about something like this many time. I mean, while using Tor, sites can't track you or fingerprint you. But the fact you setup Tor in itself gives something to someone so that they can fingerprint you.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Sites can fingerprint you if you use Tor. Tor browser tries hard to keep them from fingerprinting you, but it's a different product built on Tor (although one by the same team, or at least the same organization).
abdullahkhalids 5y ago
There are Obfsproxy bridges that make Tor traffic look like normal internet traffic. https://tb-manual.torproject.org/circumvention/ https://tb-manual.torproject.org/circumvention/
- noident 5y ago
  A more correct way to describe obfs4 is "makes Tor traffic look like unidentifiable traffic", which is in itself potentially a suspicious marker for people who want to watch Tor users. If Tor makes up the bulk of identifiable traffic, the value add of being unidentifiable is not very high. This is an active area of research for the Tor project. Pluggable transports are not perfect and can be profiled by a determined adversary, although it takes more resources and sophistication than identifying unbridged Tor traffic.
  - user3939382 5y ago
    Another problem is that popular OS’s (macOS/Windows) and popular software vendors (Google, Adobe, Microsoft) install tons of built in daemons/services that are constantly phoning home in the background with telemetry. I imagine it would be trivial to deanonymize Tor (or VPN) traffic by analyzing these payloads.

mayankkaizen 5y ago

I've never used Tor and practically know nothing about it. But I always wondered about something like this many time. I mean, while using Tor, sites can't track you or fingerprint you. But the fact you setup Tor in itself gives something to someone so that they can fingerprint you.

HWR_14 5y ago
Sites can fingerprint you if you use Tor. Tor browser tries hard to keep them from fingerprinting you, but it's a different product built on Tor (although one by the same team, or at least the same organization).

abdullahkhalids 5y ago

There are Obfsproxy bridges that make Tor traffic look like normal internet traffic. https://tb-manual.torproject.org/circumvention/ https://tb-manual.torproject.org/circumvention/

noident 5y ago
A more correct way to describe obfs4 is "makes Tor traffic look like unidentifiable traffic", which is in itself potentially a suspicious marker for people who want to watch Tor users. If Tor makes up the bulk of identifiable traffic, the value add of being unidentifiable is not very high. This is an active area of research for the Tor project. Pluggable transports are not perfect and can be profiled by a determined adversary, although it takes more resources and sophistication than identifying unbridged Tor traffic.
- user3939382 5y ago
  Another problem is that popular OS’s (macOS/Windows) and popular software vendors (Google, Adobe, Microsoft) install tons of built in daemons/services that are constantly phoning home in the background with telemetry. I imagine it would be trivial to deanonymize Tor (or VPN) traffic by analyzing these payloads.