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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 commu

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]

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]