16 ms·

Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy

294 points by bauruine 2y ago

susan_segfault 2y ago
Cheers for this, I'm the author - AMA! :) A big motivation in writing the book was to feature the voices of the people we often don't hear from in the Tor community (which is why there's a whole chapter on the people who run the relays).
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  What are your thoughts on the integrity of the network against state actors?
  - alt227 2y ago
    I assume that TOR is vulnerable to the 51% attack? If so I would imagine that state actors have the ability to spin up a million containers each hosting a node and easily take control (or at least be able to start tracing connection from entry to exit node). However Im sure this would be immediately obvious (unless they have been slowly doing this since the begining of TOR)
    - bombcar 2y ago
      IIRC there is at least one known case where a moderately major criminal was let go rather than the government disclosing how they got the evidence on him. The assumption has been that they had a way of compromising TOR that they didn't want to reveal.
      - generalizations 2y ago
        One implication of that - make sure there's no available means of parallel construction, and it's ok if they catch you in some way they don't want to reveal. As long as you're not valuable enough, that is.
        bombcar 2y ago
        That's the real bar for any security, really - make it so it's not worth the while of people who could defeat it. Because eventually, no matter what you do, if you're up against a nation state, they'll just make you dead.
  - susan_segfault 2y ago
    There's a lot in the book about this - it depends what you mean. Tor has a lot of social and technical design elements that try as best they can to minimise this risk. It would be pretty hard for intelligence services to compromise the Tor organisation in ways that meant they were deploying malicious code, for example. Plus, the way it's grown over the years has also given them some protections. In terms of deanonymising people through surveillance (for example, by spying on the whole Internet and tracing you through the Tor network), Tor explicitly doesn't protect you against this. The decision was made early on - they switched all the high-security design elements to 'off' to make the network faster. They calculated that a hyper-secure network that was so slow no-one used it was less secure - i.e. made less privacy exist in the real world - than one that was less secure but used by millions, because that would give you a huge crowd of people to hide in. This gets really complicated - because you also want lots of different kinds of people using the network, so they can't tell if you're a drug dealer, an activist, a spy etc. just because you're using Tor. Individual bits of major intelligence organisations can probably deanonymise you at some times, and not at others. The real question is if they can do so in a way that's dangerous to you in a sustained way, and if it's actually useful for them to do this. Usually, it's easier to do this through simpler mechanisms (bribing your friends, putting a camera in your bedroom, figuring out who you are etc.) than compromising the Tor network. Some security services absolutely will be researching and developing ways to deanonymise larrge numbers of Tor users at a given time - but in general, the budget for this is going to be quite high on a per-user basis (so you'd have to be a prime target for it to be worth it), and a lot of the complexity of the Internet geography makes this quite hard itself. Ultimately, for any given high value target, there are usually easier ways to get them than through breaking Tor. In almost every case, a person will make a basic OPSEC error long before mass-scale traffic analysis gets them.
    - htrp 2y ago
      The rubber hose cyptography xocd comes to mind https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
    - generalizations 2y ago
      The scenario that I understand is more plausible, is when state level actors might control some large fraction of tor nodes. Not that they have visibility into the entire internet (not ruling that out, though). The rule of thumb I've heard is that if you're a sufficiently valuable target, best assume Tor is compromised.
- susan_segfault 2y ago
  Also - it's completely free open access, but you can also buy a copy here if you like spending money: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548182/tor/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548182/tor/
  - Algemarin 2y ago
    > it's completely free open access Why are the PDFs individually watermarked? It seems antithetical to the spirit of releasing a book about Tor and "future of privacy", and to then not only watermark each PDF, but to not explicitly state that this is the case, let alone explain why.
    - andirk 2y ago
      And several analytics type of tracking pixels on the page as well. Not a big deal nor likely controllable by the author.
      - ametrau 2y ago
        It's the mit press who's publishing it no? I very highly doubt the author has access to tracking decisions made by the org putting the work out.
      - Zuiii 2y ago
        I initially read this as there being tracking pixels in the PDF. I'm hate that I have to ask this, but are tracking pixels a thing in the PDF format? (Execluding embedded js, ofc) Can PDFs be crafted such that they would ping remote servers when opened in most PDF viewers?
    - giancarlostoro 2y ago
      Watermark? In the original link the thread is based on, there is no watermarks, its probably something the publisher that sells is just happens to do.
    - matthberg 2y ago
      I agree it seems a bit scummy, yet likely unavoidable for the author due to the way MIT Press distributes things. It's thankfully licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0, which allows for converting the content to other formats (given attribution and non-commercial use, same license, etc etc) [0]. I'd reckon that making a de-fingerprinted version and redistributing it as an epub, md, or pdf again would be allowed, then. As for getting a clean copy to work from, using Tor would be quite fitting. I plan to convert the version I downloaded to epub for ereader use, maybe downloading it a couple times over different routes and combining to see if that has any impact on the fingerprinting. I'll comment with a download if I get to that and feel it's of a quality worth sharing. 0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en#ref-some-kinds-of-mods https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en#re...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
tarruda 2y ago
One thing I'm curious about Tor: What are the incentives for running a node? If there are no monetary incentives, then how does it achieves decentralization? Also, what stops a malicious actor with enough resources (a government) from controlling a big portion of the network?
- Scoundreller 2y ago
  > What are the incentives for running a node? It costs my ISP resources but I pay a flat rate. That would have value to me.
  - chii 2y ago
    if enough customers of the ISP do this, they will no longer charge a flat rate. It's just that some people manage to consume resources that other customers don't atm.
    - Scoundreller 2y ago
      My ISP situation is olipolistic (and perhaps a colluding duopoly once you distill it down enough). I’m confident it’s not an efficient market and they’re charging what the market can bare, not a tight markup over their actual costs.
  - eddd-ddde 2y ago
    Don't most ISPs have a bandwidth cap?
    - xandrius 2y ago
      Not in EU.
- LordDragonfang 2y ago
  People can do things altruistically - there doesn't always need to be a bitcoin-style monetary incentive. Lots of people run exit nodes because they believe in privacy and freedom of information. That said, you're absolutely right about large entities being able to control a large number of nodes, which is why a great number of nodes are controlled by governments trying to do so and also prevent foreign adversaries from being able to.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
> Wealth and power, the complicity of institutions, governments and communities that ignore the rights of children and disbelieve and disempower them—all of these provide far better privacy protections for child sex abusers than the Tor relay network ever could. Either the technology is good enough to make people anonymous despite their lack of wealth, power, complicity of institutions, or it's not. It can't be a weak technology only in the context of the biggest problem with Tor. > Some pointed out that it was bizarre for Tor to condemn neo-Nazis using its network when it had been largely silent on the documented issues of child abuse... much of the negative reaction to the activist turn in Tor was motivated by a reactionary queasiness towards feminism. Well yeah, that is bizarre. You're making it sound like, if we understood the tribe of college and graybeard libertarians better, compared to better-known, run-of-the-mill progressives and "intersectionality," then we can forgive how "bizarre" this sounds. I don't think that stuff matters. The commentary from the operators makes the whole effort look insincere. I don't think that relay operator actually cares that much about Turkish dissidents or whatever. That operator is definitely interested in being dramatic and provocative. That's how most libertarian ideas sound. They could align in some ways with social justice, but its failure in the marketplace of ideas is as simple as insincerity + drama.
- susan_segfault 2y ago
  Those are fair points. I would argue that it's not the tech that's weak, but that the protection that powerful people get from institutions, local networks, status in their communities etc. often give them so much access to practical power that they essentially don't need anonymity - because these institutions protect them. In terms of condemning particular use cases (or deciding not to), I'm more trying to represent a particular argument that some people make about Tor (and lots of other technologies) - i.e. that the tech itself shouldn't carry explicit values/politics, those should all be down to the users. The argument is particularly strongly made by some privacy advocates as they see things like Tor becoming the foundations of a new Internet - and hence needing the broadest possible base of support. There's obviously a lot of good arguments against this philosophy, but I figured I should try to represent the different ways people think about Tor in as good faith as possible. Obviously sometimes when people argue that they just have an issue with feminist values - sometimes it is definitely disingenuous. But I think there was a wider moment in the Tor community - in which a lot of people were concerned about the transition to a much more professional NGO, more strongly aligned with liberal, 'digital democracy' visions of US geopolitics, and away from a more chaotic and anarchic coalition. While I think there was a clear need for Tor to change and this was as much about its place amid wider changes in the landscape of digital rights, US tech, and hacker politics as anything else, it does give us a way (I think) of understanding the conflicts and choices that might emerge in Tor and other privacy enhancing infrastructures in the future.
aendruk 2y ago
There’s an “epubviewer” but no EPUB?
- susan_segfault 2y ago
  Fully open access PDF version free here: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-Dark-Web-to-the-Future-of-Privacy https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-D... Though do consider buying it if you like it!
  - crtasm 2y ago
    Is there an EPUB for sale somewhere?
    - susan_segfault 2y ago
      Aye absolutely - some links here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/744367/tor-by-ben-collier/9780262378932/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/744367/tor-by-ben-c...
hhfghf 2y ago
It seems, at the beginning of the 90s there were a lot of expectations in regard to DC-nets, considered to be a way better alternative to remailers of the time [1]. At least that's my impression after reading Tim May's FAQ (The Cyphernomicon) [2]. Any progress on this front? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer [2]: https://hackmd.io/@jmsjsph/TheCyphernomicon https://hackmd.io/@jmsjsph/TheCyphernomicon
- susan_segfault 2y ago
  This is a question I always find really interesting. There are still a lot of alternative systems circulating - often in the mid-latency space - which aim to solve design issues of Tor. Someone releases something intended to be a Tor killer every few years, but they rarely last. Tor still remains the only anonymity solution currently operating at global scale without depositing all your trust in e.g. a VPN provider, partly due to network effects (the installed size of the user base is its own protection, so any competitor system is going to perform worse at the outset regardless), the relative lack of tolerance for anything but the lowest possible latency, highest possible usability system for almost all users, and Tor's lasting success in establishing itself culturally as a global brand that can appeal differently to very different user groups. Tor's devs have also been very good at modularising and standardising the tech so it's been great at getting itself incorporated at the ground level of other technologies - and upcoming changes are only going to make that more the case. I do think that there's a good chance for other systems and models to take off that make different design decisions, but they would have a lot of economic, technical, and cultural barriers to circumvent. Not all of them are to do with the theoretical security of the system - for example, DC-net designs were always traditionally quite vulnerable to Denial of Service attacks via collision, and some of the best attacks against anonymity systems can use 'higher security' properties against them. There's a discussion of some of this in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of the book if it's of interest - also a huge amount written about this by scholars in PETS, WEIS, and other conferences (and blogs, papers, textbooks etc. in cryptospace).
ezbie 2y ago
[flagged]
- ktbwrestler 2y ago
  I don't think VPNs are the future of privacy in this context since whatever VPN tool you use or the service provider where you host your concentrator will always have to answer to a subpoena, right?
  - ezbie 2y ago
    Unless you're living a North Korea or Iran, I think there's no reason why the average Joe needs anything more than a VPN. There's a use case for Tor and the likes, but in my mind 99.5% of the people who think they need it are criminals or extremists.
    - rnd0 2y ago
      No offense meant, but that seems to be a bit of an extremist and borderline authoritarian posistion itself. "You don't need privacy if you have nothing to hide" right?
  - Zuiii 2y ago
    I'd also add that VPNs require payment so you basically have to trust them not to link your payment details or use impractical payment methods (e.g. mailing cash) and even then, that too can have issues. Tor, in contrast, Just Works and is always available (Brave browser).
    - joshlemer 2y ago
      Well, there's always crypto.
paravirtualized 2y ago
PSA: It's Tor not TOR. https://support.torproject.org/#about_why-is-it-called-tor https://support.torproject.org/#about_why-is-it-called-tor
photochemsyn 2y ago
I don't think much of this writing style. What's the tor attack surface? Are all the tor boxes on the internet backdoored by the NSA? Is tor a honeypot or is tor not a honeypot? As far as I can tell tor was designed by spooks to allow remote agents operating in foreign countries a means to communicate with headquarters without being traced. It was never designed to allow two entities to communicate anonymously. The metadata always gets exposed, doesn't it? Using tor also violates the hide in plain view principle, which all real spooks adhere to religiously.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  There was a guy in a dorm who thought he was anonymous using tor on the schools website. They caught him because it turns out he was the only one using tor. In some ways it is a honeypot.
  - Capricorn2481 2y ago
    Which story is this? I've heard a few famous stories of people getting caught using Tor, but none that were like this.
    - etc-hosts 2y ago
      https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/17/student-charged-bomb-threat/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/17/student-charge...
      - Capricorn2481 2y ago
        Yeah, that's the one I meant. It would've been fine if he was the only one using Tor, but: - Guerilla mail let the FBI know it was being accessed with Tor (or they saw it in the email header) - You have to login to use Harvard wifi with your student account, which means they could see who was using Tor. If anything, Harvard wifi is the honeypot.
        2y ago
plg 2y ago
No epub ebook format for ereaders?

294 points by bauruine 2y ago

Cheers for this, I'm the author - AMA! :) A big motivation in writing the book was to feature the voices of the people we often don't hear from in the Tor community (which is why there's a whole chapter on the people who run the relays).

datadrivenangel 2y ago
What are your thoughts on the integrity of the network against state actors?
- alt227 2y ago
  I assume that TOR is vulnerable to the 51% attack? If so I would imagine that state actors have the ability to spin up a million containers each hosting a node and easily take control (or at least be able to start tracing connection from entry to exit node). However Im sure this would be immediately obvious (unless they have been slowly doing this since the begining of TOR)
  - bombcar 2y ago
    IIRC there is at least one known case where a moderately major criminal was let go rather than the government disclosing how they got the evidence on him. The assumption has been that they had a way of compromising TOR that they didn't want to reveal.
    - generalizations 2y ago
      One implication of that - make sure there's no available means of parallel construction, and it's ok if they catch you in some way they don't want to reveal. As long as you're not valuable enough, that is.
      - bombcar 2y ago
        That's the real bar for any security, really - make it so it's not worth the while of people who could defeat it. Because eventually, no matter what you do, if you're up against a nation state, they'll just make you dead.
- susan_segfault 2y ago
  There's a lot in the book about this - it depends what you mean. Tor has a lot of social and technical design elements that try as best they can to minimise this risk. It would be pretty hard for intelligence services to compromise the Tor organisation in ways that meant they were deploying malicious code, for example. Plus, the way it's grown over the years has also given them some protections. In terms of deanonymising people through surveillance (for example, by spying on the whole Internet and tracing you through the Tor network), Tor explicitly doesn't protect you against this. The decision was made early on - they switched all the high-security design elements to 'off' to make the network faster. They calculated that a hyper-secure network that was so slow no-one used it was less secure - i.e. made less privacy exist in the real world - than one that was less secure but used by millions, because that would give you a huge crowd of people to hide in. This gets really complicated - because you also want lots of different kinds of people using the network, so they can't tell if you're a drug dealer, an activist, a spy etc. just because you're using Tor. Individual bits of major intelligence organisations can probably deanonymise you at some times, and not at others. The real question is if they can do so in a way that's dangerous to you in a sustained way, and if it's actually useful for them to do this. Usually, it's easier to do this through simpler mechanisms (bribing your friends, putting a camera in your bedroom, figuring out who you are etc.) than compromising the Tor network. Some security services absolutely will be researching and developing ways to deanonymise larrge numbers of Tor users at a given time - but in general, the budget for this is going to be quite high on a per-user basis (so you'd have to be a prime target for it to be worth it), and a lot of the complexity of the Internet geography makes this quite hard itself. Ultimately, for any given high value target, there are usually easier ways to get them than through breaking Tor. In almost every case, a person will make a basic OPSEC error long before mass-scale traffic analysis gets them.
  - htrp 2y ago
    The rubber hose cyptography xocd comes to mind https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
  - generalizations 2y ago
    The scenario that I understand is more plausible, is when state level actors might control some large fraction of tor nodes. Not that they have visibility into the entire internet (not ruling that out, though). The rule of thumb I've heard is that if you're a sufficiently valuable target, best assume Tor is compromised.
susan_segfault 2y ago
Also - it's completely free open access, but you can also buy a copy here if you like spending money: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548182/tor/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548182/tor/
- Algemarin 2y ago
  > it's completely free open access Why are the PDFs individually watermarked? It seems antithetical to the spirit of releasing a book about Tor and "future of privacy", and to then not only watermark each PDF, but to not explicitly state that this is the case, let alone explain why.
  - andirk 2y ago
    And several analytics type of tracking pixels on the page as well. Not a big deal nor likely controllable by the author.
    - ametrau 2y ago
      It's the mit press who's publishing it no? I very highly doubt the author has access to tracking decisions made by the org putting the work out.
    - Zuiii 2y ago
      I initially read this as there being tracking pixels in the PDF. I'm hate that I have to ask this, but are tracking pixels a thing in the PDF format? (Execluding embedded js, ofc) Can PDFs be crafted such that they would ping remote servers when opened in most PDF viewers?
  - giancarlostoro 2y ago
    Watermark? In the original link the thread is based on, there is no watermarks, its probably something the publisher that sells is just happens to do.
  - matthberg 2y ago
    I agree it seems a bit scummy, yet likely unavoidable for the author due to the way MIT Press distributes things. It's thankfully licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0, which allows for converting the content to other formats (given attribution and non-commercial use, same license, etc etc) [0]. I'd reckon that making a de-fingerprinted version and redistributing it as an epub, md, or pdf again would be allowed, then. As for getting a clean copy to work from, using Tor would be quite fitting. I plan to convert the version I downloaded to epub for ereader use, maybe downloading it a couple times over different routes and combining to see if that has any impact on the fingerprinting. I'll comment with a download if I get to that and feel it's of a quality worth sharing. 0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en#ref-some-kinds-of-mods https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en#re...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

tarruda 2y ago

One thing I'm curious about Tor: What are the incentives for running a node? If there are no monetary incentives, then how does it achieves decentralization? Also, what stops a malicious actor with enough resources (a government) from controlling a big portion of the network?

Scoundreller 2y ago
> What are the incentives for running a node? It costs my ISP resources but I pay a flat rate. That would have value to me.
- chii 2y ago
  if enough customers of the ISP do this, they will no longer charge a flat rate. It's just that some people manage to consume resources that other customers don't atm.
  - Scoundreller 2y ago
    My ISP situation is olipolistic (and perhaps a colluding duopoly once you distill it down enough). I’m confident it’s not an efficient market and they’re charging what the market can bare, not a tight markup over their actual costs.
- eddd-ddde 2y ago
  Don't most ISPs have a bandwidth cap?
  - xandrius 2y ago
    Not in EU.
LordDragonfang 2y ago
People can do things altruistically - there doesn't always need to be a bitcoin-style monetary incentive. Lots of people run exit nodes because they believe in privacy and freedom of information. That said, you're absolutely right about large entities being able to control a large number of nodes, which is why a great number of nodes are controlled by governments trying to do so and also prevent foreign adversaries from being able to.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

> Wealth and power, the complicity of institutions, governments and communities that ignore the rights of children and disbelieve and disempower them—all of these provide far better privacy protections for child sex abusers than the Tor relay network ever could. Either the technology is good enough to make people anonymous despite their lack of wealth, power, complicity of institutions, or it's not. It can't be a weak technology only in the context of the biggest problem with Tor. > Some pointed out that it was bizarre for Tor to condemn neo-Nazis using its network when it had been largely silent on the documented issues of child abuse... much of the negative reaction to the activist turn in Tor was motivated by a reactionary queasiness towards feminism. Well yeah, that is bizarre. You're making it sound like, if we understood the tribe of college and graybeard libertarians better, compared to better-known, run-of-the-mill progressives and "intersectionality," then we can forgive how "bizarre" this sounds. I don't think that stuff matters. The commentary from the operators makes the whole effort look insincere. I don't think that relay operator actually cares that much about Turkish dissidents or whatever. That operator is definitely interested in being dramatic and provocative. That's how most libertarian ideas sound. They could align in some ways with social justice, but its failure in the marketplace of ideas is as simple as insincerity + drama.

susan_segfault 2y ago
Those are fair points. I would argue that it's not the tech that's weak, but that the protection that powerful people get from institutions, local networks, status in their communities etc. often give them so much access to practical power that they essentially don't need anonymity - because these institutions protect them. In terms of condemning particular use cases (or deciding not to), I'm more trying to represent a particular argument that some people make about Tor (and lots of other technologies) - i.e. that the tech itself shouldn't carry explicit values/politics, those should all be down to the users. The argument is particularly strongly made by some privacy advocates as they see things like Tor becoming the foundations of a new Internet - and hence needing the broadest possible base of support. There's obviously a lot of good arguments against this philosophy, but I figured I should try to represent the different ways people think about Tor in as good faith as possible. Obviously sometimes when people argue that they just have an issue with feminist values - sometimes it is definitely disingenuous. But I think there was a wider moment in the Tor community - in which a lot of people were concerned about the transition to a much more professional NGO, more strongly aligned with liberal, 'digital democracy' visions of US geopolitics, and away from a more chaotic and anarchic coalition. While I think there was a clear need for Tor to change and this was as much about its place amid wider changes in the landscape of digital rights, US tech, and hacker politics as anything else, it does give us a way (I think) of understanding the conflicts and choices that might emerge in Tor and other privacy enhancing infrastructures in the future.

aendruk 2y ago

There’s an “epubviewer” but no EPUB?

susan_segfault 2y ago
Fully open access PDF version free here: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-Dark-Web-to-the-Future-of-Privacy https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-D... Though do consider buying it if you like it!
- crtasm 2y ago
  Is there an EPUB for sale somewhere?
  - susan_segfault 2y ago
    Aye absolutely - some links here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/744367/tor-by-ben-collier/9780262378932/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/744367/tor-by-ben-c...

hhfghf 2y ago

It seems, at the beginning of the 90s there were a lot of expectations in regard to DC-nets, considered to be a way better alternative to remailers of the time [1]. At least that's my impression after reading Tim May's FAQ (The Cyphernomicon) [2]. Any progress on this front? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer [2]: https://hackmd.io/@jmsjsph/TheCyphernomicon https://hackmd.io/@jmsjsph/TheCyphernomicon

susan_segfault 2y ago
This is a question I always find really interesting. There are still a lot of alternative systems circulating - often in the mid-latency space - which aim to solve design issues of Tor. Someone releases something intended to be a Tor killer every few years, but they rarely last. Tor still remains the only anonymity solution currently operating at global scale without depositing all your trust in e.g. a VPN provider, partly due to network effects (the installed size of the user base is its own protection, so any competitor system is going to perform worse at the outset regardless), the relative lack of tolerance for anything but the lowest possible latency, highest possible usability system for almost all users, and Tor's lasting success in establishing itself culturally as a global brand that can appeal differently to very different user groups. Tor's devs have also been very good at modularising and standardising the tech so it's been great at getting itself incorporated at the ground level of other technologies - and upcoming changes are only going to make that more the case. I do think that there's a good chance for other systems and models to take off that make different design decisions, but they would have a lot of economic, technical, and cultural barriers to circumvent. Not all of them are to do with the theoretical security of the system - for example, DC-net designs were always traditionally quite vulnerable to Denial of Service attacks via collision, and some of the best attacks against anonymity systems can use 'higher security' properties against them. There's a discussion of some of this in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of the book if it's of interest - also a huge amount written about this by scholars in PETS, WEIS, and other conferences (and blogs, papers, textbooks etc. in cryptospace).

ezbie 2y ago

[flagged]

ktbwrestler 2y ago
I don't think VPNs are the future of privacy in this context since whatever VPN tool you use or the service provider where you host your concentrator will always have to answer to a subpoena, right?
- ezbie 2y ago
  Unless you're living a North Korea or Iran, I think there's no reason why the average Joe needs anything more than a VPN. There's a use case for Tor and the likes, but in my mind 99.5% of the people who think they need it are criminals or extremists.
  - rnd0 2y ago
    No offense meant, but that seems to be a bit of an extremist and borderline authoritarian posistion itself. "You don't need privacy if you have nothing to hide" right?
- Zuiii 2y ago
  I'd also add that VPNs require payment so you basically have to trust them not to link your payment details or use impractical payment methods (e.g. mailing cash) and even then, that too can have issues. Tor, in contrast, Just Works and is always available (Brave browser).
  - joshlemer 2y ago
    Well, there's always crypto.

paravirtualized 2y ago

PSA: It's Tor not TOR. https://support.torproject.org/#about_why-is-it-called-tor https://support.torproject.org/#about_why-is-it-called-tor

photochemsyn 2y ago

I don't think much of this writing style. What's the tor attack surface? Are all the tor boxes on the internet backdoored by the NSA? Is tor a honeypot or is tor not a honeypot? As far as I can tell tor was designed by spooks to allow remote agents operating in foreign countries a means to communicate with headquarters without being traced. It was never designed to allow two entities to communicate anonymously. The metadata always gets exposed, doesn't it? Using tor also violates the hide in plain view principle, which all real spooks adhere to religiously.

throwaway48476 2y ago
There was a guy in a dorm who thought he was anonymous using tor on the schools website. They caught him because it turns out he was the only one using tor. In some ways it is a honeypot.
- Capricorn2481 2y ago
  Which story is this? I've heard a few famous stories of people getting caught using Tor, but none that were like this.
  - etc-hosts 2y ago
    https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/17/student-charged-bomb-threat/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/17/student-charge...
    - Capricorn2481 2y ago
      Yeah, that's the one I meant. It would've been fine if he was the only one using Tor, but: - Guerilla mail let the FBI know it was being accessed with Tor (or they saw it in the email header) - You have to login to use Harvard wifi with your student account, which means they could see who was using Tor. If anything, Harvard wifi is the honeypot.
      - 2y ago

plg 2y ago

No epub ebook format for ereaders?