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Tor: How a military project became a lifeline for privacy
- zwnow 1y agoIsn't Tor dead? Wasn't it infiltrated long ago?
- 8organicbits 1y agoWhat makes you believe that?
- zwnow 1y agoRead some story about some authority having set up tons of servers within the tor network to bust some criminal activity effectively making it not anonymous anymore. Was a while back on HN
- thewebguyd 1y agoThe feds and other equivalent agencies in other countries have been running exit nodes for years, but its still better than most solutions even if not perfect. Anyone who has gotten caught though likely wasn't because of any flaws in Tor (or said exit nodes) but because of other lapses in OpSec. That being said, yes, feds can de-anonymize traffic, probably reliably at this point. There are only about 7-8000 active nodes, most in data centers. The less nodes you hop through, the more likely that traffic can be traced back to the entry point (guard node), and combined with timing can be reasonably traced back to the user. Tor works best with many, many nodes, and a minimum of three. There's not as many nodes as there needs to be so quite often it's only 3 you are going through (guard node/entry point, middle node, exit node) Plus browsing habits can also be revealing. Just because someone is using Tor doesn't mean they also have disabled javascript, blocked cookies, aren't logging into accounts, etc.
- bombcar 1y ago> Anyone who has gotten caught though likely wasn't because of any flaws in Tor (or said exit nodes) but because of other lapses in OpSec. There have been some cases where some consider the "other lapses in OpSec" to be parallel construction to disguise a Tor vulnerability/breach, and others where the government has declined to prosecute because they'd have to reveal how they know. If Tor were compromised, we'd likely not know. It's highly likely that it's fine for "normal people" things.
- ls612 1y agoAt least back in the Snowden days it was very unreliable for the US to deanonymize Tor traffic based on those documents.
- lenerdenator 1y agoThat was over a decade ago. They've almost certainly progressed since. ... now my back hurts and I want the damn kids off my lawn.
- ls612 1y agoI mean if anything it’s harder today in many ways for the government than it was during the Snowden days, because that prompted tech people to take internet security seriously. Look at the cost trends for 0days over the past ten years.
- openasocket 1y agoDoes controlling exit nodes necessarily help with deanonimizing? You would need control of the internal nodes for classic de-anonymization, or monitoring of both the exit nodes and the originating network for timing attacks. Also, exit nodes aren’t involved in hidden services. That 7-8000 figure you quoted: is that just exit nodes, or all nodes? My understanding was there aren’t a ton of exit nodes because anyone operating an exit node is liable to get harassed by people impacted by any malicious traffic originating from Tor. But that isn’t really an issue for internal nodes, and so there are more of them
- 8kingDreux8 1y agoI believe this is the thread you're talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41584428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41584428
- 8organicbits 1y agoThe article talks about a user who was using very old software, which seems like a pretty straightforward mistake. There's a bunch of speculation in the comments about other things, but I don't really see sources cited, so it's hard to tell what informs those opinions.
- chews 1y agoIt was always that way, Ross Ulbrect was connected to his dark website by tracing via exit nodes. Tor was always a government tool.
- thewebguyd 1y ago> Ross Ulbrect was connected to his dark website by tracing via exit nodes Ulbricht wasn't caught because of flaws in Tor, but he made other mistakes. He posted stuff on LinkedIn alluding to his activities, he used a real photo on his fake IDs to rent servers, he used his real name, posting a question on stack over flow about running a Tor service, he posted his personal gmail, looked for couriers on Google+, and lastly paid an undercover cop for a hit. As for getting his location, once the feds gained acccess to silk road, they matched up activity logs, his posting habits were consistent with being in the pacific time zone, and they matched up his user name between his posts on silk road as altoid and he reused the same screenname, associated with his gmail address and full name, on other websites. A series of stupid opsec mistakes got him caught, not Tor.
- lenerdenator 1y agoAll of this should serve as a reminder that if .gov really, really wants you, they've got you. Unless, of course, they want everybody, which even they don't have the resources to handle.
- mburns 1y agoIt should (also) serve as a reminder that OpSec is important.
- throwaway290 1y agoMaybe a reminder to also not sell heavy drugs to children or to order murder for hire?
- cluckindan 1y ago
- Ray20 1y agoThe observable world around us. In a world where Tor is not a honeypot of some three letter agency, there are implementations of projects like Jim Bell's Assassination Politics. In a world where Tor is not a honeypot its use would be banned, much like the use of Tornado Cash was banned and shut down until the secret services took control of it. And we obviously don't live in such world.
- 8organicbits 1y ago> its use would be banned There are many places in the world where direct access to Tor is blocked. There are many countries where use of a VPN is illegal, VPNs are required to log by law, etc. I disagree with this premise.
- trod1234 1y agoThose countries seek destructive control of all within its sphere of influence. There are generally two types of countries, those that seek agency, independence, and freedom of rational thought and action; which requires privacy, and there are those that seek ultimate control, imposing dependence, coercion and corruption of reason; from the top down. The cultures that seek total control generally fall under totalism and are parasitic in nature. The ones that seek agency, freedom, and independence, Protean.
- nickslaughter02 1y agoEU countries will soon join the club. "VPN services may soon become a new target of EU lawmakers after being deemed a "key challenge"" https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-services-may-soon-become-a-new-target-of-eu-lawmakers-after-being-deemed-a-key-challenge https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-servi...
- kelipso 1y agoProbably because those governments don’t control the honeypot.
- bevr1337 1y agoIt's been assumed that three-letter agencies operate many exit nodes for a hot minute. I don't know if this is a special case of infiltration because it's TOR SOP.
- HDThoreaun 1y agoThis isnt necessarily malicious. As the OP states TOR only works if a lot of people use it for regular browsing. The government wants it to work for the covert stuff so they need buy in from regulars and improving the service is how to do that.
- impossiblefork 1y agoI personally can't see how it can be secure without dummy messages.
- yieldcrv 1y agoIts not a binary thing, Tor updates all the time Many comments talk about exit nodes for surveillance, but there is a totally different vector of use and considerations that dint apply when you aren't trying to access clearnet And even on darknet it depends on what you’re doing Reading the NY Times’ darknet site or forum or even nuet browsing darknet markerplace from Tor Browser, whereas I would use a Tor OS like Tails or dual gated VM like Whonix for doing something illicit
- markasoftware 1y agoIt depends on your threat model. Tor is focused on hiding from small-scale passive adversaries (eg, you're in Iran and don't want the Iranian government to see what you're doing. Or your ISP. Or any single node operator). Even the original Tor paper makes it clear that Tor isn't secure against a "global passive adversary" that can observe a large portion of global internet traffic, like the five eyes likely can today. If you want to avoid global passive adversaries, a mixnet like Nym can work. I'm also working on a related project which takes a different approach of building your own circuit of proxy servers manually with lots of traffic padding: https://github.com/markasoftware/i405-tunnel https://github.com/markasoftware/i405-tunnel
- zwnow 1y agoI just use it to get books for free so idk about all the state regulation stuff.
- matthewdgreen 1y agoNym is cool, but it has many of the same vulnerabilities as Tor. You can set higher per-node delays in principle, which means your packets will also take longer to get there. But this makes it hard to use most network protocols.
- niceguy4 1y agoI don't believe these solutions protect against flow correlation observations. If a global adversary is monitoring the entry and exit points, they can identify the user without needing to decrypt the traffic. There are research papers that demonstrate attacks on both these models. Onion endpoint sites use encrypted traffic and the padding strategy, too and are still susceptible to the correlation attack. There's a security blog that publishes research papers on different attack models. It's a total PITA to find but I'll see if I can locate it. edit: JFC... finally found it: https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/ https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/ Correlation attack concept: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2024-337-paper.pdf https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2024-337-p... Attack against Mixnet and Nym: https://petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0050.pdf https://petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0050.pdf
- stefantalpalaru 1y ago[dead]
- lenerdenator 1y agoI've never felt like I knew how to use Tor correctly, or trusted anyone to be able to guide me on that.
- sherr 1y agoI sympathise with a bit of paranoia about this. Personally, I'd use a platform like "Tails" (do your own research) which wraps Tor up in a USB bootable Linux OS. https://tails.net/ https://tails.net/
- hnuser123456 1y agoBack when I tried, it was a modified Firefox build.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoThat's just a browser form of it: https://www.torproject.org/download/ https://www.torproject.org/download/
- abdullahkhalids 1y agoSimply download the Tor Browser [1], which is simply a hardened version of Firefox that connects to the Tor network. Don't install addons in this browser. Don't resize the browser window. All tor browsers instances have the same default window size, which prevents websites from tracking you. Obviously don't login into websites with your regular email or provide websites with your PII. If you are in a country or on a network that blocks the basic Tor network, the FAQ explains how to get around this by using Tor bridges or other techniques [2]. That's pretty much all you need to know. [1] https://www.torproject.org/download/ https://www.torproject.org/download/ [2] https://support.torproject.org/censorship/ https://support.torproject.org/censorship/
- lenerdenator 1y ago> All tor browsers instances have the same default window size, which prevents websites from tracking you. Wouldn't that in and of itself be a possible clue that someone was using Tor?
- apopapo 1y agoTor is nice, but I still prefer i2p.
- Synaesthesia 1y agoIt's all about trust
- fsflover 1y agoWith free software the trust is minimized. Instead, you rely on the community checks.
- keysdev 1y agoBut it is more difficult to run
- ravenstine 1y agoI2P is a superior network design. It's a shame it gets so little attention.
- dostick 1y agoI think i2p will eventually replace Tor. Or should replace. Because Tor has inherent issue with de-anonymisation: you just need to deploy certain number of nodes to facilitate that. And there’s no way of knowing if certain agencies already did that.
- ricardo81 1y agoI'd never used Tor, though had to scrape a bunch of things that required different IPs. I figured their endpoints were already tarred. With the porn block in the UK though, the "New Private Window with Tor" in Brave is very convenient. Maybe not for long, or maybe not. I guess websites don't need to comply beyond a certain point. There are tons of "residential proxy" and whatnot type services available, IP being a source of truth doesn't seem to matter much in 2025. The Perplexity 'bot' recent topic being an example of that. Basically if you want to access any resource on the web for a dollar a GB or so you can use millions of IPs.
- freedomben 1y agoIndeed, I've investigated some cyber attacks recently that came from residential IPs in California and NY, though investigation turned up the real origins as coming from India. It's pretty easy to pull off nowadays
- deadbabe 1y agoAny tutorial?
- mzajc 1y agoResidential proxies usually piggy back off unsuspecting users, either through hacked routers/IoT, malicious browser extensions, malicious smartphone applications, or any other kind of malware. If you're looking for a tutorial on how to infect and exploit users, you're not on the right site. As an illustration of how bad things are on just the browser extension front: https://sponsor.ajay.app/emails/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/emails/
- deadbabe 1y agoI’m asking how do you determine the real origins as being from India when they are using residential ips as proxies.
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- taminka 1y agoi wish they were also a lifeline for censorship too, tor is effectively non functional in many countries :(
- markasoftware 1y agotor tries very hard to bypass censorship. Have you tried the numerous Tor bridges, or the new Snowflake p2p bridge?
- taminka 1y agoyeah none of them work in russia, only thing that works is xray vpn
- r721 1y agoObfs4 bridges work (if you can find an non-blocked one): https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-country.html?start=2025-05-11&end=2025-08-09&country=ru https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-country.html...
- jmclnx 1y agoI ran a bridge until recently, but the server died a heat death after I moved to another apartment :( I have not yet had time to find a suitable replacement machine. But running a bridge is a cheap, safe low network volume method people can help out from home. I had it going to help people in 'bad' countries to get out to the rest of the world. https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/bridge/ https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/bridge/
- WarOnPrivacy 1y ago> I ran a bridge until recently A lifetime ago, I ran bridges from RAM only distros. But early versions of the Dan list (1st in wide use) killed that. DL didn't try hard to differentiate between bridge IPs and exit IPs. Server hosts just grabbed the first list they saw and blocked with it. It was years before the notion of Exit != Bridge became understood but everyone had moved on. We're at the entropic 'No One Cares Anymore' phase now.
- costco 1y agoWere you running specifically a bridge or just a non exit relay? Bridges are generally unlisted and are somewhat expensive to mass scrape (the bridge distributors will require captcha or email or Telegram etc) so they are less likely to show up in those lists. Whereas all relays are listed in the consensus and can be trivially enumerated.
- WarOnPrivacy 1y ago> Were you running specifically a bridge or just a non exit relay? Good question. I was probably running Tor-ramdisk. I just looked around can't find any reference that it could serve as a bridge. From that I infer I was running as a relay.
- neilv 1y agoI used Tor for surveillance. But an appropriate kind, IMHO. I used Tor as a small part of one of the capabilities of a supply chain integrity startup. I built a fancy scraper/crawler to discreetly monitor a major international marketplace (mainstream, not darknet), including selecting appropriate Tor exit nodes for each regional site, to try to ensure that we were seeing the same site content that people from those regions were seeing. Tor somehow worked perfectly for those needs. So my only big concern was making sure everyone in the startup knew not to go bragging about this unusually good data we had. Since we were one C&D letter away from not being able to get the data at all. (Unfortunately, this had to be a little adversarial with the marketplace, not done as a data-sharing partnership, since the marketplace benefited from a cut of all the counterfeit and graymarket sales that we were trying to fight. But I made sure the scraper was gentle yet effective, both to not be a jerk, and also to not attract attention.) (I can talk about it now, since the startup ran out of runway during Covid investor skittishness.)
- RGamma 1y ago> selecting appropriate Tor exit nodes for each regional site So, a proxy? Onion routing doesn't really play a role for this use case.
- neilv 1y ago> So, a proxy? Onion routing doesn't really play a role for this use case. The onion routing obscured our identity from the "proxy" exit nodes. Separately, Tor was also a convenient way to get a lot of arbitrary country-specific "proxies", without dealing with the sometimes sketchy businesses that are behind residential IP proxies. (Counterfeiting/graymarket operations can be organized crime. I'd rather just fire up Tor, and trust math a little, than to try to vet the legitimacy and intentions of a residential IP broker.)
- sidewndr46 1y agoWhy would you need to obscure your identity from the exit nodes?
- notxjosh 1y ago[flagged]
- anarbadalov 1y agoFor anyone interested in this author’s book on Tor, it’s available for free download! 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... (full disclosure: i work for MIT Press)
- bauruine 1y agoYou can also buy it if you want to support the autor. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548182/tor/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548182/tor/
- dannyobrien 1y agoIt's a really good book! I was on the very edges of this scene for a chunk of the time described, and I thought it managed to catch a lot of the complexities without picking one possible narrative over another. Plus I learned a lot -- it came out of some academic research that pursued a unique angle: finding and talking to the Tor exit node operators about their experiences, rather than just say the developers, the executives, or the funders.
- anarbadalov 1y agoI'll share your kind words with the author!
- TMWNN 1y agoThanks for that. Is it available as epub? I would like to read it on Kindle.
- NoSalt 1y agoEspecially as the internet, itself, started as a military project. [DARPA]
- fsckboy 1y ago>Tor: How a military project became a lifeline for privacy Arpanet: How a military project gutted personal privacy, destabilized self esteem and strangled attention spans
- ezbie 1y ago[flagged]
- mvieira38 1y agoVPNs just shift trust from the service provider to the VPN provider, and I don't have much reason to do so for most of my uses. NordVPN or Surfshark are way scummier than a harmless blog or HN, for example, and have more financial and legal incentives to track me
- philipallstar 1y ago"People who disagree with me are paedophiles" isn't great.
- rangestransform 1y agoOf course any privacy measure protects criminals of all sorts, that doesn't mean it's not worth having
- globular-toast 1y agoHope you never lock the bathroom door or close the curtains in your house. Imagine what you might be doing in there!
- fsflover 1y agoThis is completely missing the point of why one needs privacy. Lack of it harms journalism and activism, making the government too powerful and not accountable. If only activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it will be much easier to target them. Everyone should have privacy to protect them. It’s sort of like freedom of speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for everyone, even if you have nothing to say.
- daft_pink 1y agoI think they publicized it so they could obscurely use it for military purposes. The users are easy to spot if they are all military users. Get tons and tons of regular users to use it and you obscure who is trying to hide.
- esseph 1y agoThis is exactly it from what I have heard. I have heard this from a large number of trustworthy sources over the years.
- schoen 1y agoI think we have to distinguish between "the Navy proposed using it this way for this reason" (clearly they did, in writing!) and "the government actively uses it this way for this reason" (extremely hard to confirm). I've met law enforcement people who talked about using Tor for anonymity during investigations, but in context they were looking for anonymity on the exit side rather than the entry side (so, a traditional VPN would have worked too). The original proposal about onion routing is focused on the security provided on the entry side (preventing local telecommunications operators from knowing whom you're communicating with).
- esseph 1y agoThe claim is that allows State Department, CIA, and NSA officials to communicate from remote regions with anonymity.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- matthewdgreen 1y agoIt's unclear if they really did this, or if this was just the pitch they gave to the government. But it was never secret that this was a goal they had explained to the US government: the inventors were pretty straightforward about everything.
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- crmd 1y agoI assume when I’m using Tor that every packet is the under the highest level of collection/analysis priority. I think maybe sometimes it’s better to blend into in the crowd
- beeflet 1y agothat short-term thinking is what makes it impossible to blend in the long run
- costco 1y agoIf you already have an understanding of how Tor works and want to know how attacks on it work, read these! - https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/vanguards/blob/master/README_SECURITY.md https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/vanguards/blob/master/READM... - https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/vanguards/blob/master/README_TECHNICAL.md https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/vanguards/blob/master/READM... - https://spec.torproject.org/proposals/344-protocol-info-leaks.html https://spec.torproject.org/proposals/344-protocol-info-leak...
- kobieps 1y agoFriendly reminder that exit nodes are to be avoided. Hidden services are the way to go.
- fsflover 1y agoIn this case you should use I2P, which is specifically designed for hidden services (eepsites) first.
- immibis 1y agoI2P has a completely different architecture and AFAIK it remains to be known which one is better.
- fsflover 1y agoIsn't it obvious that when everyone is a middle node by default and all tunnels are one-way and randomly changing every 10 minutes, it must be harder to perform deanonymizing attacks?
- immibis 1y agoOn the other hand, one tunnel is one user for 10 monutes at a time. And everyone knows when your client is online because it's a relay.
- fsflover 1y agoYes, just like with Tor, the fact that you're using it is not a secret. What you're doing there is.
- immibis 1y agoIf you're a relay, then the dates and times you are online are public and may be correlated to the times a particular username logs into a particular hidden service, if that is also public. With Tor, I'd at least have to snoop your specific connection or your guard relay to know when you're online, but with I2P, it's public knowledge.
- thrown-0825 1y agoAnd now its all honey pot exit nodes. Just setup a vpn.
- rufw91 1y agoTor is hardly private IMO. Whoever has the largest no of servers can see all the traffic
- Citizen8396 1y agoHow could they ensure that they always control the entry and exit nodes? Do you suppose all entities able and willing to do this would cooperate with each other?
- EliRivers 1y agoWhoever has the largest no of servers can see all the traffic Is that true? If there are a million servers, and I control ten of them, and everyone else who has control of servers controls only nine each (so I have the largest number of servers, as you say), surely I will be missing out on almost all the traffic?
- palsecam 1y agoBtw, a Tor relay can be relatively lightweight. I run one on a $5/mo VPS (which does many other things). You need 1 GiB of RAM, but a single basic CPU core largely suffices. My relay sends/receives ~150 GiB of traffic per day (~15 Mbits/s). It’s not an exit node, so no legal worries. Here’s my torrc: SocksPort 0 ExitRelay 0 ORPort NNNN DirPort NNNN Nickname X ContactInfo X@X.com RelayBandwidthRate 80 megabits RelayBandwidthBurst 120 megabits MaxMemInQueues 384 megabytes AvoidDiskWrites 1 HardwareAccel 1 NoExec 1 NumCPUs 1 Here’s my override config for systemd (Ubuntu 24.04): $ sudo systemctl edit tor@default [Service] Nice=15 CPUAffinity=0 CPUWeight=60 StartupCPUWeight=6 IOWeight=60 TimerSlackNSec=100us MemoryMax=896M MemoryHigh=800M OOMScoreAdjust=1000 LimitAS=2G LimitNPROC=512 LimitNOFILE=10240 PrivateDevices=true ProtectSystem=true ProtectHome=true