9 ms·

What's next for Tor and privacy online?

186 points by fsflover 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
selfselfgo 3y ago
[dead]
SamuelAdams 3y ago
Is Tor still considered secure? If a single entity controls enough entry and exit nodes, I thought it was possible to identify users? Examples: [1]: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fbi-crack-tor-catch-1500-visitors-biggest-child-pornography-website-dark-web-1536417 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fbi-crack-tor-catch-1500-visitors-... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34412080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34412080 [3]: https://www.wired.com/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/ https://www.wired.com/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/
- pphysch 3y ago
  The Tor Project is primarily funded by the US State Department and DARPA [1], so it is a forgivable error if someone mistook TOR for FBI surveillance software. [1] - https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/ https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/
  - nacs 3y ago
    Tor seem pretty open about where that money is coming from and have DARPA and US goverment funds listed here with explanations: https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors/ https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors/ "U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor leads the U.S. efforts to promote democracy, protect human rights and international religious freedom, and advance labor rights globally." "DARPA's Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE) program researches technologies for a distributed messaging system that can: a) exist completely within a given network, b) provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability of messaging" Both of those seem to align with Tor's goals of privacy and confidentiality.
    - pphysch 3y ago
      How does that square with the GP's linked articles that allege the FBI "cracked" TOR on multiple occasions? It strikes me as cognitive dissonance that someone would simultaneously distrust the USG for obvious reasons (TFA is about Snowden), yet also think they are a perfectly noble arbiter of "secure communications", and look the other way when copious evidence suggests that the USG has means to compromise said "secure communications". It's a very roundabout way of arguing "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". TOR is a fine product if you aren't doing anything that the USG would realistically prosecute you for.
      - kube-system 3y ago
        The USG is not a monolith and doesn't operate like one. It is composed of many entirely different organizations doing different things with different goals.
        pphysch 3y ago
        If it were just one agency, sure, but we have evidence that State, DARPA, and FBI all have their hands in the TOR cookie jar. It would be naive to assume that CIA and NSA aren't there too. Occam's Razor says that TOR is primarily a tool of the USG for enabling intelligence & influence operations, particularly those involving low-level assets without clearances (e.g. color revolutions), and the stuff about "consumer privacy" is an unreliable side effect.
    - nerdbert 3y ago
      Even if they aren't spying on people's TOR traffic, it's still useful for spies. The more people are using TOR, the easier it is for them to hide their own traffic alongside it.
- jstanley 3y ago
  What are you going to do? Not use Tor? That's hardly better.
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    There are alternatives to Tor that have different anonymity and routing protocols. For example, take a look at I2P, which has been around almost as long as Tor. It has a lot in common with Tor, but has some key differences that may be appealing to some people. I2P nodes are capable of implementing something like an exit node (often called an "outproxy"), but there's no distinction between peers in I2P that designates one as an exit node. The project is more oriented towards hidden services, implementing its internal network, than it is in anonymizing connections to the clearweb. I think it's great that Tor exists, but I wish more people would consider I2P or at least simultaneously hosting their hidden services on both Tor and I2P. And if you really don't like running a Java runtime, Purple I2P exists and is written in C++. There are also other networks like GNUnet, which slightly predates Tor, which is mostly file-sharing oriented, but with the goal of anonymity. It can do other things too but, from what I can tell, the project never gained much favor anywhere. Nevertheless, it still exists and is being worked on. And I can't forget Freenet, or what's not referred to as "Hyphanet". I'll just call it Freenet for now because a lot of people still remember it. Freenet's focus is not only on anonymity but providing a distributed data store that is censorship resistant. This at least in part solves the issue of having to be online all the time in order to host a hidden service. It's been a long time since I've used Freenet, but supposedly the community is very good at discouraging crime and other unsavory elements. I haven't used the new iteration called Hyphanet. All of these projects have significant differences from Tor, and some of these differences are seen by some as fixing significant flaws present in the Tor protocol that Tor can't reconcile. I2P's design of having no peer distinctions, in my opinion, is a vastly superior model for both security and plausible deniability. Its routing protocol also makes DDoS attacks a greater challenge. Having a primitive yet effective implementation of human-readable hostnames is also nice. All of these projects are available for people to use today. Tor does have two upsides. The first is that it has a larger community. The second is that it has the Tor Browser, which I2P does not have an equivalent to, although the Tor Browser can be adapted to use I2P.
- mike_hock 3y ago
  Just because the FBI used shitty browser exploits that would have easily been thwarted by sandboxing the browser properly, doesn't mean that Tor is secure. Running Tor nodes is pocket change for intelligence agencies, and a major legal risk for volunteers. It's virtually guaranteed that the US intelligence agencies own the majority of the network between them. If they were in an arms race with foreign intelligence agencies, the number of Tor nodes would be exploding. It's just that the NSA won't lend its shiniest toys to the FBI just to bust some CP websites. The lives of children aren't worth the risk of exposing and losing a zero-day exploit.
  - rockskon 3y ago
    Is it a major legal risk for volunteers? In most jurisdictions I've only heard of awkward conversations with police not familiar with what Tor is, but beyond that? Not much outside of jurisdictions that already aren't friendly to Tor.
  - hifromwork 3y ago
    >It's virtually guaranteed that the US intelligence agencies own the majority of the network between them. I'm unconvinced by this argument. First of all, why US intelligence agencies and not let's say Czech intelligence agencies? Or, more likely, nobody owns the majority of the network and nobody wants an arms race?
- Syonyk 3y ago
  > Is Tor still considered secure? Define "secure." Secure from what attackers, in what threat model, with what resources devoted to the attack, etc. There are several categories of attack against Tor, and several ways to mitigate them, depending on who you are and what you use Tor for. For a typical end user of Tor, the main one to worry about is "browser beaconing" style attacks - where a compromised onion website causes the browser to beacon out, on the clearnet, with something that links the browser's request on the clearnet to the browser's activity on the onion network. If you just use a regular browser proxied to Tor, this is a rather high risk, as browsers leak all sorts of things (I believe WebRTC was a common way of doing it for a while). The solution here is Whonix - a multi-VM setup in which your workstation (with a stripped down browser) is only connected to a Torification VM that routes all inbound traffic over Tor. So, if the browser tries to beacon out, it doesn't matter. Pop open a command shell and use ping, it still goes out through Tor. Etc. I consider this a reasonable way to use Tor, and any lesser construct is probably a dumb idea unless you're using it for things like sysadmin where beaconing out doesn't matter. Of note, Qubes supports the Whonix configuration as a first party sort of setup, and can route all your traffic through Tor, should you care. There's also the risk of traffic correlation for end users, but I don't have a sense for the scale of this risk - I wouldn't leave long running connections over Tor, but I don't know if it matters for "casual use." If you're hosting hidden services, the "guardian nodes" that know your identity are a risk, and given how many nodes seem to be run by three letter agencies, you'll want to deeply understand Tor and how to protect your services if you're going to host something - I believe you can limit guardian nodes to those you trust (and run yourself, perhaps?), but that changes some of the risk equations in ways I don't fully understand how to reason about (not running hidden services that matter - my blog has an .onion address, but it's literally just the same content as the clearnet version). And then, we get into the problem that "computers in general" could be argued very convincingly to be "not in the slightest bit secure against a high level adversary," which is another can of worms...
  - hifromwork 3y ago
    > Pop open a command shell and use ping, it still goes out through Tor. Nitpick, but since there's no way to send ICMP traffic through a SOCKS proxy, using ping from whonix workstation is impossible (i.e. it won't work). But any other kind of beaconing (DNS leak, curl to a clearnet website) will be properly torified.
- michaelt 3y ago
  Tor is considered as good as anything. After all, if you suspect the feds control a lot of tor nodes you probably also suspect they’ve infiltrated or outright own the major VPNs; that they’ve got special access to the major cloud providers, and that they’ve got backdoors in things like TPMs and remote management agents. Of course Tor has its problems - exit nodes with trash IP reputations, unreliable hidden services, evil exit nodes and suchlike. So it’s certainly not perfect.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    > Tor is considered as good as anything. By who? It's an important question for someone taking this advice. One drawback of Tor is that it attracts attention to you.
  - 127361 3y ago
    Team Cymru claim to be able to trace through VPNs using widely collected flow records from Internet core routers. ISPs sell these flow records to third parties. So the whole fabric of the Internet itself is one giant spy machine, in effect. That sounds like is like it's straight out of dystopian fiction, but no, it's for real. https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg84yy/data-brokers-netflow-data-team-cymru https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg84yy/data-brokers-netflow-...
    - AlexandrB 3y ago
      I wonder if stuff like this can be thwarted by having a constant flow of encrypted junk traffic between two parties - only replacing the junk with real data (but not changing the volume) when they're actively communicating. Obviously, this doesn't scale for something like social media. But metadata regarding one-on-one conversations using something like Signal could be effectively obscured.
      - 127361 3y ago
        Trouble is it's so difficult to know what your adversary is doing, it's better to switch to a different medium i.e. reduce dependence on the Internet (as I detailed in another post). The fundamental nature of the Internet itself permits this behavior to go unchecked, there is no way for a user to know what is happening behind the scenes with certainty. We send out our private information (search queries, etc.) into this giant black box we have no control over. That's the crux of it. That was not the case with radio or satellite TV, the ability to determine what people were listening to or watching on a mass scale was nearly impossible due to the laws of physics. As the system was completely receive-only.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
throwoutway 3y ago
Wasn't expecting to find something amazing from this blog post, but this project looks amazing! and has a few big partners behind it so I hope it does not vaporware https://onionshare.org/ https://onionshare.org/
- beeburrt 3y ago
  Micah Lee also made Dangerzone [1] a tool to safely convert untrusted pdf files to safe-to-open pdf files, wrote the book Hacks, Leaks, and Revalations [2] and he made Tor-Browser-Launcher [3] and he's a respected investigative journalist: https://micahflee.com/ https://micahflee.com/ [1] https://dangerzone.rocks/ https://dangerzone.rocks/ [2] https://hacksandleaks.com/ https://hacksandleaks.com/ [3] https://github.com/torproject/torbrowser-launcher https://github.com/torproject/torbrowser-launcher
- brnt 3y ago
  I wish hosting a Tor website was as easy as Onionshare though. Start an app, point it at a dir with a rendered static site, and hand out the dot-onion to whomever you wish to show it. I'm thinking: ephemeral websites like Opera Unite used to provide, to e.g. share a photo album for as long as you're online. Edit: I should probably say I'm talking about the Android version. Which would be so convenient for an appliancy web server. The desktop version already do this.
  - prussia 3y ago
    In my experience hosting an onionsite is actually easier than hosting a regular website. Two or three lines in a .torrc file, then `tor -f .torrc & python -m http.server -d static` or whatever to start the webserver, and everything is handled for you (iirc doing `mkdir tor/hidden_service` might also be needed?). No need to port forward or fiddle with DNS... Though hosting two at once is a bit of a pain ([0]).. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14321214/how-to-run-multiple-tor-processes-at-once-with-different-exit-ips#18895491 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14321214/how-to-run-mult...
    - brnt 3y ago
joe_the_user 3y ago
It seems like there are multiple reactions one can have to Snowden type revelations: 1) "I have nothing to hide" (which isn't quite as bad as it sounds - "my security is being a nobody") 2) "The government shouldn't be spying on people" 3) "The government shouldn't be spying on people but of course they are and you should expect that. Your online privacy is essentially your jobs and you shouldn't use services and expect them to protect your privacy" 4) "Even if the state is always actually going to spy on people in various fashions, we still don't want to accept and normalize this. Forcing the state to 'parallel construction' is better than letting the just publicly exhibit all its surveillance since normalized surveillance has more of a chilling effect. Moreover, institutions have a limited ability to keep their own secrets so surveillance is itself going to periodically come into the open and when it does, attacking it is useful, again, even if we know it will always be an element of modern society". 5) And you can go on and on... Should we allow enough explicit machinery of surveillance to make the state not want to use don't-ask-don't-tell third parties (no but..) and so-forth.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > which isn't quite as bad as it sounds It is as bad as it sounds: not only the apologists of this rhetoric believe in the false securities of it themselves, but they aggressively try to persuade everyone what if you don't want to be a nobody or have anything what you don't want to share with a complete strangers, including the government - then you are doing something illegal.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    It's not so much that digital security isn't important -- it's that if you are not a "nobody", and you have something to hide, digital security is further down your list of your worries. I think too many people think about "digital security" in isolation, without any human context or considerations of threat profile. Digital security without holistic human security is simply a math exercise.
  - rixthefox 3y ago
    As a addendum to this. I think many of the J6 crowd thought the same thing when posts they made online were used in evidence against them. You may have nothing to hide, but like Snowden said: "Saying you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say"* In both situations there is a loss of privacy and autonomy. At some point people just shut down, for the same reasons people behave differently when they know they are under surveillance verses when they think they're not. *paraphrasing
grammers 3y ago
It's terrifying that basically nothing has changed since the Snowden leaks. And most people simply don't care so governments can keep scooping up our data, sifting through it for whatever they may deem interesting.
- apapapa 3y ago
  Nothing has changed because we didn't get another leak ... Its likely much worst.
- SamuelAdams 3y ago
  The push for HTTPS everywhere came directly from the Snowden revelations, and that is considered a good thing. Now people are focused on encrypting metadata, so things like DNSSEC took off. There was a recent discussion about how state actors are using push notifications to spy on users. Maybe that is the next area of improvement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38543155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38543155
  - ksjskskskkk 3y ago
    https everywhere is literally throwing the baby with the bathwater. yeah we got a little better at hiding content, still leaking ton of metadata, and still vulnerable to all the root CAs in your browser... and lost cache and everything else that http had.
    - gruez 3y ago
      >and still vulnerable to all the root CAs in your browser... certificate transparency makes this very risky to pull off, making it all but useless unless you're trying to catch a international terrorist or something.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - ksjskskskkk 3y ago
camdenlock 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
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camdenlock 3y ago
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aborsy 3y ago
It seems that there are at most 10000 Tor nodes. Are the identity of the node operators known? Do known trusted organizations and individuals own the majority of these nodes? It’s indeed expensive and risky for individuals to run Tor notes.
- sdsd 3y ago
  I know that Chaos Computer Club used to run a bunch of them. And Noisebridge did for a while, but I think they stopped. A few universities, too. I haven't been very active in the space for about a decade, I'd also love a more knowledgeable answer
- dpifke 3y ago
  See https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/ https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/ It's up to individual relay operators whether or not to publish contact information. For an example, see one of my relays here: https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/w/relay/375DCBB2DBD94E5263BC0C015F0C9E756669617E.html https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/w/relay/375DCBB2DBD94E52... (If you're not an exit relay, it's neither risky nor expensive.)
- 127361 3y ago
  Try the I2P anonymous network where by default every user is also a router. You can chain the two together, set I2P to use an outproxy and set the Tor browser to connect through I2P. I have no clue as to what security this provides nowadays. I predict the NSA or FBI have large scale packet timing correlation in operation now. Or the random number generator has been compromised, or there are a series of bugs in the Tor or I2P implementation itself? I also think there was a human compromise of the Tor Project itself 8-9 years ago as well, it has been significantly weakened. Personally I tend to like one-way data broadcasting systems, that way the receivers cannot be traced if they are air-gapped, e.g. satellite or radio data broadcasting. However nobody operates any useful service nowadays. Twenty years ago you could receive the whole worldwide Usenet feed with a DVB-S PCI card, unencrypted in the clear from a service called Cidera[1]. It was just UDP multicast packets containing Usenet messages, split into fragments with sequence numbers, trivial to reverse engineer. I had this at service home, we had dial-up and with a 55cm satellite dish in my bedroom window, I had a 45Mb/s data feed. I wrote my own software including a device driver for the DVB-S card running under FreeBSD (4.2-RELEASE I believe). Nearly 1000x faster than dial up, which was mind-blowing back then. Also archiving Nostr text messages is interesting, you can get the entire worldwide feed of messages from the relays, and then search for whatever topic of interest you want in the messages. Nobody can tell what you are searching for, unless your computer is compromised. I'm thinking about broadcasting these by satellite somehow, but satellite bandwidth is very expensive. It's just a matter of getting the funds for it. Reception should be possible using a RTL-SDR or AD9364+USB3.0 microcontroller[2], and a satellite TV dish. The AD9364 chip can be had from AliExpress[3] for $6 now. 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20020806064624/http://www.cidera.com/services/usenet_news/index.php https://web.archive.org/web/20020806064624/http://www.cidera... 2. https://www.crowdsupply.com/amungo-navigation/stixrf https://www.crowdsupply.com/amungo-navigation/stixrf 3. https://www.aliexpress.com/i/33017832196.html https://www.aliexpress.com/i/33017832196.html
_8j50 3y ago
Make it a tun interface instead of a socks proxy. LD_PRELOAD/proxychains for stuff isn't nice or leak proof. They should also partner with vpn providers so vpn tunnels terminate in Tor and exit from it and Tor exits get hosted more and more by vpn providers (bit harder to block/classify as a tor exit). Also, a new class of exits that support traffic only to specific subnets for sites that are "good" (low abuse potential like bbc, wikipedia,news sites,archive sites), these exits can be run out of people's residential IPs and phones
nufonewhodis 3y ago
Hi, is it possible to mark the packages that leave your house and flow into the street using your router or some small device in the box that connects the cables from outside going into your house? And could these boxes on the street do a job like that? I mean, even if I have a DIY network, hard- and software, at home, wouldn't it be futile because my encrypted packages, while not easily opened, could still be "marked" at any point outside my house?! With a prefix or in between the packets? That's what someone on the internet means, when they say, the more of us use Tor, the better protected the few are and the fewer users surf via tor, the less protected whistleblowers and journalists are. Also: when our packages are encrypted, wouldn't it be possible for specific software, say, MS Windows, to pack huge amounts of very specific data into some of these packages, that would get encrypted in "reengineerable" ways, that are easier to break? I have a surface-level understanding of the basics of these things. Forgive me for not reading up on that stuff, first. Edit 2: could similar things be done via CPU? I always wondered what the disadvantages of Apples way of keeping stuff in RAM were. Can the CPU send or safe data about what's in RAM in ways that can't be easily tracked via the OS?
Unfrozen0688 3y ago
Is the https://snowflake.torproject.org/ https://snowflake.torproject.org/ still good. I run the extension on everything. My country basically does not block anything.
aborsy 3y ago
Two questions on Tor. 1. Browsers have become complex, and the users’ machines could be conceivably compromised through zero days in the browser. How does the security of the Tor browser, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Brave compare with one another (in terms of chances of zero days)? 2. Do people here use Tor for everyday use (accessing the clearnet, not onion links)?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- belorn 3y ago
  > 2. Do people here use Tor for everyday use (accessing the clearnet, not onion links)? I use it almost daily. It is a great tool for sysadmin work, and a must for a lot of websites with less-than-honorable tracking policy.
  - mdip 3y ago
    There's about a thousand other ways to do it, but every time I want to see if a site is accessible to the outside world-at-large, I fire up Tor browser.
- crtasm 3y ago
  Tor Browser is essentially Firefox ESR and gets regular updates. Yes.
- fsflover 3y ago
  You can use Qubes Whonix to avoid relying on the browser security alone.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Tor experts: Why does Tor daemon try to access some random domains, i.e., www.[randomstring].com, when it starts up. It sends SNI, i.e., plaintext domain name over the wire. What purpose does that serve other than to allow anyone sniffing the network to see it. This has been brought up on HN before. In 2013 and 2014. Why is the daemon still doing this in 2023. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8623254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8623254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505056
- bauruine 3y ago
  Those random domains belong to Tor relays. The list of relays is public anyway so you can just look at the IP address to see that it's a Tor connection. Obfuscating it would achieve nothing. If you want to hide that you are using Tor you should use a bridge. https://bridges.torproject.org/ https://bridges.torproject.org/
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
    All true, but the question I am asking is why SNI is needed. For example, if the domains are bogus and the certificates are not obtained from a CA that checks domain registrations. What is the purpose. Are these bogus domain names unique to each Tor user. Why not use ECH.
    - bauruine 3y ago
      IIRC it just should look like normal TLS traffic. They are unique to each of the already public Tor relays not the users. What benefit would ECH bring? You can still look at the IP and know it's Tor. All the "let's hide that it's Tor" work is done with pluggable transports [0] used in combination with unlisted relays (bridges). This way there can be multiple completely different protocols like obfs4 (looks completely random), Snowflake (uses WebRTC), meek (uses domain fronting) and WebTunnel (WebSockets over https) without a need to update the Tor spec and all relays. [0]: https://spec.torproject.org/pt-spec/architecture-overview.html https://spec.torproject.org/pt-spec/architecture-overview.ht...
rnd0 3y ago
Fuck all, is what. People are far too happy to embrace surveillance and embrace censorships in the name of "think of the cause du-jour". Even advocating free speech one has to worry about being painted as an alt-right 'freeze peach' kook. Privacy and other rights online are soon going to go the way of their offline cousins -down the drain!

186 points by fsflover 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

selfselfgo 3y ago

[dead]

SamuelAdams 3y ago

Is Tor still considered secure? If a single entity controls enough entry and exit nodes, I thought it was possible to identify users? Examples: [1]: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fbi-crack-tor-catch-1500-visitors-biggest-child-pornography-website-dark-web-1536417 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fbi-crack-tor-catch-1500-visitors-... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34412080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34412080 [3]: https://www.wired.com/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/ https://www.wired.com/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/

pphysch 3y ago
The Tor Project is primarily funded by the US State Department and DARPA [1], so it is a forgivable error if someone mistook TOR for FBI surveillance software. [1] - https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/ https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/
- nacs 3y ago
  Tor seem pretty open about where that money is coming from and have DARPA and US goverment funds listed here with explanations: https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors/ https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors/ "U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor leads the U.S. efforts to promote democracy, protect human rights and international religious freedom, and advance labor rights globally." "DARPA's Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE) program researches technologies for a distributed messaging system that can: a) exist completely within a given network, b) provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability of messaging" Both of those seem to align with Tor's goals of privacy and confidentiality.
  - pphysch 3y ago
    How does that square with the GP's linked articles that allege the FBI "cracked" TOR on multiple occasions? It strikes me as cognitive dissonance that someone would simultaneously distrust the USG for obvious reasons (TFA is about Snowden), yet also think they are a perfectly noble arbiter of "secure communications", and look the other way when copious evidence suggests that the USG has means to compromise said "secure communications". It's a very roundabout way of arguing "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". TOR is a fine product if you aren't doing anything that the USG would realistically prosecute you for.
    - kube-system 3y ago
      The USG is not a monolith and doesn't operate like one. It is composed of many entirely different organizations doing different things with different goals.
      - pphysch 3y ago
        If it were just one agency, sure, but we have evidence that State, DARPA, and FBI all have their hands in the TOR cookie jar. It would be naive to assume that CIA and NSA aren't there too. Occam's Razor says that TOR is primarily a tool of the USG for enabling intelligence & influence operations, particularly those involving low-level assets without clearances (e.g. color revolutions), and the stuff about "consumer privacy" is an unreliable side effect.
  - nerdbert 3y ago
    Even if they aren't spying on people's TOR traffic, it's still useful for spies. The more people are using TOR, the easier it is for them to hide their own traffic alongside it.
jstanley 3y ago
What are you going to do? Not use Tor? That's hardly better.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  There are alternatives to Tor that have different anonymity and routing protocols. For example, take a look at I2P, which has been around almost as long as Tor. It has a lot in common with Tor, but has some key differences that may be appealing to some people. I2P nodes are capable of implementing something like an exit node (often called an "outproxy"), but there's no distinction between peers in I2P that designates one as an exit node. The project is more oriented towards hidden services, implementing its internal network, than it is in anonymizing connections to the clearweb. I think it's great that Tor exists, but I wish more people would consider I2P or at least simultaneously hosting their hidden services on both Tor and I2P. And if you really don't like running a Java runtime, Purple I2P exists and is written in C++. There are also other networks like GNUnet, which slightly predates Tor, which is mostly file-sharing oriented, but with the goal of anonymity. It can do other things too but, from what I can tell, the project never gained much favor anywhere. Nevertheless, it still exists and is being worked on. And I can't forget Freenet, or what's not referred to as "Hyphanet". I'll just call it Freenet for now because a lot of people still remember it. Freenet's focus is not only on anonymity but providing a distributed data store that is censorship resistant. This at least in part solves the issue of having to be online all the time in order to host a hidden service. It's been a long time since I've used Freenet, but supposedly the community is very good at discouraging crime and other unsavory elements. I haven't used the new iteration called Hyphanet. All of these projects have significant differences from Tor, and some of these differences are seen by some as fixing significant flaws present in the Tor protocol that Tor can't reconcile. I2P's design of having no peer distinctions, in my opinion, is a vastly superior model for both security and plausible deniability. Its routing protocol also makes DDoS attacks a greater challenge. Having a primitive yet effective implementation of human-readable hostnames is also nice. All of these projects are available for people to use today. Tor does have two upsides. The first is that it has a larger community. The second is that it has the Tor Browser, which I2P does not have an equivalent to, although the Tor Browser can be adapted to use I2P.
mike_hock 3y ago
Just because the FBI used shitty browser exploits that would have easily been thwarted by sandboxing the browser properly, doesn't mean that Tor is secure. Running Tor nodes is pocket change for intelligence agencies, and a major legal risk for volunteers. It's virtually guaranteed that the US intelligence agencies own the majority of the network between them. If they were in an arms race with foreign intelligence agencies, the number of Tor nodes would be exploding. It's just that the NSA won't lend its shiniest toys to the FBI just to bust some CP websites. The lives of children aren't worth the risk of exposing and losing a zero-day exploit.
- rockskon 3y ago
  Is it a major legal risk for volunteers? In most jurisdictions I've only heard of awkward conversations with police not familiar with what Tor is, but beyond that? Not much outside of jurisdictions that already aren't friendly to Tor.
- hifromwork 3y ago
  >It's virtually guaranteed that the US intelligence agencies own the majority of the network between them. I'm unconvinced by this argument. First of all, why US intelligence agencies and not let's say Czech intelligence agencies? Or, more likely, nobody owns the majority of the network and nobody wants an arms race?
Syonyk 3y ago
> Is Tor still considered secure? Define "secure." Secure from what attackers, in what threat model, with what resources devoted to the attack, etc. There are several categories of attack against Tor, and several ways to mitigate them, depending on who you are and what you use Tor for. For a typical end user of Tor, the main one to worry about is "browser beaconing" style attacks - where a compromised onion website causes the browser to beacon out, on the clearnet, with something that links the browser's request on the clearnet to the browser's activity on the onion network. If you just use a regular browser proxied to Tor, this is a rather high risk, as browsers leak all sorts of things (I believe WebRTC was a common way of doing it for a while). The solution here is Whonix - a multi-VM setup in which your workstation (with a stripped down browser) is only connected to a Torification VM that routes all inbound traffic over Tor. So, if the browser tries to beacon out, it doesn't matter. Pop open a command shell and use ping, it still goes out through Tor. Etc. I consider this a reasonable way to use Tor, and any lesser construct is probably a dumb idea unless you're using it for things like sysadmin where beaconing out doesn't matter. Of note, Qubes supports the Whonix configuration as a first party sort of setup, and can route all your traffic through Tor, should you care. There's also the risk of traffic correlation for end users, but I don't have a sense for the scale of this risk - I wouldn't leave long running connections over Tor, but I don't know if it matters for "casual use." If you're hosting hidden services, the "guardian nodes" that know your identity are a risk, and given how many nodes seem to be run by three letter agencies, you'll want to deeply understand Tor and how to protect your services if you're going to host something - I believe you can limit guardian nodes to those you trust (and run yourself, perhaps?), but that changes some of the risk equations in ways I don't fully understand how to reason about (not running hidden services that matter - my blog has an .onion address, but it's literally just the same content as the clearnet version). And then, we get into the problem that "computers in general" could be argued very convincingly to be "not in the slightest bit secure against a high level adversary," which is another can of worms...
- hifromwork 3y ago
  > Pop open a command shell and use ping, it still goes out through Tor. Nitpick, but since there's no way to send ICMP traffic through a SOCKS proxy, using ping from whonix workstation is impossible (i.e. it won't work). But any other kind of beaconing (DNS leak, curl to a clearnet website) will be properly torified.
michaelt 3y ago
Tor is considered as good as anything. After all, if you suspect the feds control a lot of tor nodes you probably also suspect they’ve infiltrated or outright own the major VPNs; that they’ve got special access to the major cloud providers, and that they’ve got backdoors in things like TPMs and remote management agents. Of course Tor has its problems - exit nodes with trash IP reputations, unreliable hidden services, evil exit nodes and suchlike. So it’s certainly not perfect.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > Tor is considered as good as anything. By who? It's an important question for someone taking this advice. One drawback of Tor is that it attracts attention to you.
- 127361 3y ago
  Team Cymru claim to be able to trace through VPNs using widely collected flow records from Internet core routers. ISPs sell these flow records to third parties. So the whole fabric of the Internet itself is one giant spy machine, in effect. That sounds like is like it's straight out of dystopian fiction, but no, it's for real. https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg84yy/data-brokers-netflow-data-team-cymru https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg84yy/data-brokers-netflow-...
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    I wonder if stuff like this can be thwarted by having a constant flow of encrypted junk traffic between two parties - only replacing the junk with real data (but not changing the volume) when they're actively communicating. Obviously, this doesn't scale for something like social media. But metadata regarding one-on-one conversations using something like Signal could be effectively obscured.
    - 127361 3y ago
      Trouble is it's so difficult to know what your adversary is doing, it's better to switch to a different medium i.e. reduce dependence on the Internet (as I detailed in another post). The fundamental nature of the Internet itself permits this behavior to go unchecked, there is no way for a user to know what is happening behind the scenes with certainty. We send out our private information (search queries, etc.) into this giant black box we have no control over. That's the crux of it. That was not the case with radio or satellite TV, the ability to determine what people were listening to or watching on a mass scale was nearly impossible due to the laws of physics. As the system was completely receive-only.
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throwoutway 3y ago

Wasn't expecting to find something amazing from this blog post, but this project looks amazing! and has a few big partners behind it so I hope it does not vaporware https://onionshare.org/ https://onionshare.org/

beeburrt 3y ago
Micah Lee also made Dangerzone [1] a tool to safely convert untrusted pdf files to safe-to-open pdf files, wrote the book Hacks, Leaks, and Revalations [2] and he made Tor-Browser-Launcher [3] and he's a respected investigative journalist: https://micahflee.com/ https://micahflee.com/ [1] https://dangerzone.rocks/ https://dangerzone.rocks/ [2] https://hacksandleaks.com/ https://hacksandleaks.com/ [3] https://github.com/torproject/torbrowser-launcher https://github.com/torproject/torbrowser-launcher
brnt 3y ago
I wish hosting a Tor website was as easy as Onionshare though. Start an app, point it at a dir with a rendered static site, and hand out the dot-onion to whomever you wish to show it. I'm thinking: ephemeral websites like Opera Unite used to provide, to e.g. share a photo album for as long as you're online. Edit: I should probably say I'm talking about the Android version. Which would be so convenient for an appliancy web server. The desktop version already do this.
- prussia 3y ago
  In my experience hosting an onionsite is actually easier than hosting a regular website. Two or three lines in a .torrc file, then `tor -f .torrc & python -m http.server -d static` or whatever to start the webserver, and everything is handled for you (iirc doing `mkdir tor/hidden_service` might also be needed?). No need to port forward or fiddle with DNS... Though hosting two at once is a bit of a pain ([0]).. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14321214/how-to-run-multiple-tor-processes-at-once-with-different-exit-ips#18895491 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14321214/how-to-run-mult...
  - brnt 3y ago

joe_the_user 3y ago

It seems like there are multiple reactions one can have to Snowden type revelations: 1) "I have nothing to hide" (which isn't quite as bad as it sounds - "my security is being a nobody") 2) "The government shouldn't be spying on people" 3) "The government shouldn't be spying on people but of course they are and you should expect that. Your online privacy is essentially your jobs and you shouldn't use services and expect them to protect your privacy" 4) "Even if the state is always actually going to spy on people in various fashions, we still don't want to accept and normalize this. Forcing the state to 'parallel construction' is better than letting the just publicly exhibit all its surveillance since normalized surveillance has more of a chilling effect. Moreover, institutions have a limited ability to keep their own secrets so surveillance is itself going to periodically come into the open and when it does, attacking it is useful, again, even if we know it will always be an element of modern society". 5) And you can go on and on... Should we allow enough explicit machinery of surveillance to make the state not want to use don't-ask-don't-tell third parties (no but..) and so-forth.

justsomehnguy 3y ago
> which isn't quite as bad as it sounds It is as bad as it sounds: not only the apologists of this rhetoric believe in the false securities of it themselves, but they aggressively try to persuade everyone what if you don't want to be a nobody or have anything what you don't want to share with a complete strangers, including the government - then you are doing something illegal.
- kube-system 3y ago
  It's not so much that digital security isn't important -- it's that if you are not a "nobody", and you have something to hide, digital security is further down your list of your worries. I think too many people think about "digital security" in isolation, without any human context or considerations of threat profile. Digital security without holistic human security is simply a math exercise.
- rixthefox 3y ago
  As a addendum to this. I think many of the J6 crowd thought the same thing when posts they made online were used in evidence against them. You may have nothing to hide, but like Snowden said: "Saying you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say"* In both situations there is a loss of privacy and autonomy. At some point people just shut down, for the same reasons people behave differently when they know they are under surveillance verses when they think they're not. *paraphrasing

grammers 3y ago

It's terrifying that basically nothing has changed since the Snowden leaks. And most people simply don't care so governments can keep scooping up our data, sifting through it for whatever they may deem interesting.

apapapa 3y ago
Nothing has changed because we didn't get another leak ... Its likely much worst.
SamuelAdams 3y ago
The push for HTTPS everywhere came directly from the Snowden revelations, and that is considered a good thing. Now people are focused on encrypting metadata, so things like DNSSEC took off. There was a recent discussion about how state actors are using push notifications to spy on users. Maybe that is the next area of improvement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38543155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38543155
- ksjskskskkk 3y ago
  https everywhere is literally throwing the baby with the bathwater. yeah we got a little better at hiding content, still leaking ton of metadata, and still vulnerable to all the root CAs in your browser... and lost cache and everything else that http had.
  - gruez 3y ago
    >and still vulnerable to all the root CAs in your browser... certificate transparency makes this very risky to pull off, making it all but useless unless you're trying to catch a international terrorist or something.
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - ksjskskskkk 3y ago

camdenlock 3y ago

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camdenlock 3y ago

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aborsy 3y ago

It seems that there are at most 10000 Tor nodes. Are the identity of the node operators known? Do known trusted organizations and individuals own the majority of these nodes? It’s indeed expensive and risky for individuals to run Tor notes.

sdsd 3y ago
I know that Chaos Computer Club used to run a bunch of them. And Noisebridge did for a while, but I think they stopped. A few universities, too. I haven't been very active in the space for about a decade, I'd also love a more knowledgeable answer
dpifke 3y ago
See https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/ https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/ It's up to individual relay operators whether or not to publish contact information. For an example, see one of my relays here: https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/w/relay/375DCBB2DBD94E5263BC0C015F0C9E756669617E.html https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/w/relay/375DCBB2DBD94E52... (If you're not an exit relay, it's neither risky nor expensive.)
127361 3y ago
Try the I2P anonymous network where by default every user is also a router. You can chain the two together, set I2P to use an outproxy and set the Tor browser to connect through I2P. I have no clue as to what security this provides nowadays. I predict the NSA or FBI have large scale packet timing correlation in operation now. Or the random number generator has been compromised, or there are a series of bugs in the Tor or I2P implementation itself? I also think there was a human compromise of the Tor Project itself 8-9 years ago as well, it has been significantly weakened. Personally I tend to like one-way data broadcasting systems, that way the receivers cannot be traced if they are air-gapped, e.g. satellite or radio data broadcasting. However nobody operates any useful service nowadays. Twenty years ago you could receive the whole worldwide Usenet feed with a DVB-S PCI card, unencrypted in the clear from a service called Cidera[1]. It was just UDP multicast packets containing Usenet messages, split into fragments with sequence numbers, trivial to reverse engineer. I had this at service home, we had dial-up and with a 55cm satellite dish in my bedroom window, I had a 45Mb/s data feed. I wrote my own software including a device driver for the DVB-S card running under FreeBSD (4.2-RELEASE I believe). Nearly 1000x faster than dial up, which was mind-blowing back then. Also archiving Nostr text messages is interesting, you can get the entire worldwide feed of messages from the relays, and then search for whatever topic of interest you want in the messages. Nobody can tell what you are searching for, unless your computer is compromised. I'm thinking about broadcasting these by satellite somehow, but satellite bandwidth is very expensive. It's just a matter of getting the funds for it. Reception should be possible using a RTL-SDR or AD9364+USB3.0 microcontroller[2], and a satellite TV dish. The AD9364 chip can be had from AliExpress[3] for $6 now. 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20020806064624/http://www.cidera.com/services/usenet_news/index.php https://web.archive.org/web/20020806064624/http://www.cidera... 2. https://www.crowdsupply.com/amungo-navigation/stixrf https://www.crowdsupply.com/amungo-navigation/stixrf 3. https://www.aliexpress.com/i/33017832196.html https://www.aliexpress.com/i/33017832196.html

_8j50 3y ago

Make it a tun interface instead of a socks proxy. LD_PRELOAD/proxychains for stuff isn't nice or leak proof. They should also partner with vpn providers so vpn tunnels terminate in Tor and exit from it and Tor exits get hosted more and more by vpn providers (bit harder to block/classify as a tor exit). Also, a new class of exits that support traffic only to specific subnets for sites that are "good" (low abuse potential like bbc, wikipedia,news sites,archive sites), these exits can be run out of people's residential IPs and phones

nufonewhodis 3y ago

Hi, is it possible to mark the packages that leave your house and flow into the street using your router or some small device in the box that connects the cables from outside going into your house? And could these boxes on the street do a job like that? I mean, even if I have a DIY network, hard- and software, at home, wouldn't it be futile because my encrypted packages, while not easily opened, could still be "marked" at any point outside my house?! With a prefix or in between the packets? That's what someone on the internet means, when they say, the more of us use Tor, the better protected the few are and the fewer users surf via tor, the less protected whistleblowers and journalists are. Also: when our packages are encrypted, wouldn't it be possible for specific software, say, MS Windows, to pack huge amounts of very specific data into some of these packages, that would get encrypted in "reengineerable" ways, that are easier to break? I have a surface-level understanding of the basics of these things. Forgive me for not reading up on that stuff, first. Edit 2: could similar things be done via CPU? I always wondered what the disadvantages of Apples way of keeping stuff in RAM were. Can the CPU send or safe data about what's in RAM in ways that can't be easily tracked via the OS?

Unfrozen0688 3y ago

Is the https://snowflake.torproject.org/ https://snowflake.torproject.org/ still good. I run the extension on everything. My country basically does not block anything.

aborsy 3y ago

Two questions on Tor. 1. Browsers have become complex, and the users’ machines could be conceivably compromised through zero days in the browser. How does the security of the Tor browser, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Brave compare with one another (in terms of chances of zero days)? 2. Do people here use Tor for everyday use (accessing the clearnet, not onion links)?

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belorn 3y ago
> 2. Do people here use Tor for everyday use (accessing the clearnet, not onion links)? I use it almost daily. It is a great tool for sysadmin work, and a must for a lot of websites with less-than-honorable tracking policy.
- mdip 3y ago
  There's about a thousand other ways to do it, but every time I want to see if a site is accessible to the outside world-at-large, I fire up Tor browser.
crtasm 3y ago
Tor Browser is essentially Firefox ESR and gets regular updates. Yes.
fsflover 3y ago
You can use Qubes Whonix to avoid relying on the browser security alone.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Tor experts: Why does Tor daemon try to access some random domains, i.e., www.[randomstring].com, when it starts up. It sends SNI, i.e., plaintext domain name over the wire. What purpose does that serve other than to allow anyone sniffing the network to see it. This has been brought up on HN before. In 2013 and 2014. Why is the daemon still doing this in 2023. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8623254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8623254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505056

bauruine 3y ago
Those random domains belong to Tor relays. The list of relays is public anyway so you can just look at the IP address to see that it's a Tor connection. Obfuscating it would achieve nothing. If you want to hide that you are using Tor you should use a bridge. https://bridges.torproject.org/ https://bridges.torproject.org/
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  All true, but the question I am asking is why SNI is needed. For example, if the domains are bogus and the certificates are not obtained from a CA that checks domain registrations. What is the purpose. Are these bogus domain names unique to each Tor user. Why not use ECH.
  - bauruine 3y ago
    IIRC it just should look like normal TLS traffic. They are unique to each of the already public Tor relays not the users. What benefit would ECH bring? You can still look at the IP and know it's Tor. All the "let's hide that it's Tor" work is done with pluggable transports [0] used in combination with unlisted relays (bridges). This way there can be multiple completely different protocols like obfs4 (looks completely random), Snowflake (uses WebRTC), meek (uses domain fronting) and WebTunnel (WebSockets over https) without a need to update the Tor spec and all relays. [0]: https://spec.torproject.org/pt-spec/architecture-overview.html https://spec.torproject.org/pt-spec/architecture-overview.ht...

rnd0 3y ago

Fuck all, is what. People are far too happy to embrace surveillance and embrace censorships in the name of "think of the cause du-jour". Even advocating free speech one has to worry about being painted as an alt-right 'freeze peach' kook. Privacy and other rights online are soon going to go the way of their offline cousins -down the drain!