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Counter Galois Onion: Improved encryption for Tor circuit traffic
- 47282847 10mo agoCool! Congrats! Awesome work. Small typo: “observing predicatable changes“
- sevg 10mo agoI think you’re getting downvoted because you’re reporting the typo in an odd and likely unproductive place. I’m not sure what you expect HN readers to do about the typo. There is a comment section on the blog itself :)
- gus_massa 10mo agoIt's not unusual that the author (or someone of the team) see the trafic peak an appears in HN to reply the questions.
- sevg 10mo agoSure, that happens. But instead of just reporting it directly, we instead get this unsubstantive comment (“Cool! Great! Btw you spelled a word wrong.”). Essentially just noise, nothing that provokes curiosity or interesting discussion.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- blocchainz 10mo ago[dead]
- greekrich92 10mo agoIs it quantum-proof?
- vscode-rest 10mo agoQuantum isn’t the problem. Majority-internet telemetry is.
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo agoIs it alien-proof?
- JoachimS 10mo agoAll information is translated to Finnish at ingress, so yes.
- m00dy 10mo agohey guys, anyone believes Tor still can provide anonymity to users ? just trying to ask politely.
- dannyobrien 10mo agobroadly yes, but the real question is: what's your threat model? https://ssd.eff.org/glossary/threat-model https://ssd.eff.org/glossary/threat-model
- m00dy 10mo agoI mean definitely state level actor, for example, let's say you can access all data centers in EU as most tor nodes are located in EU.
- jeroenhd 10mo agoThere are countermeasures you can take against timing attacks, pattern analysis, and other capabilities an attacker may have if they control many relays. If you're trying to exfiltrate military secrets to the Russians, you can probably do it, but you'll have to be extremely careful. Your behaviour is as important as the network you use to communicate over, if not more important. There is no single state actor that has access to all data centers in the EU, though. For some countries, there's barely a state actor that can access all data centers within a single country. There is no tool that will let you become immune against a theoretical hyper powerful super government that controls all data centers, just by clicking a button. There never will be.
- edgineer 10mo agoThere's some neat math that shows how one could send (radio) signals which are undetectable to an observer. Last I read, the research was in specific, purely theoretical scenarios but the idea is that you could send bit impulses which stay within the noise floor. Transmit with a power less than R^2 (in discrete time and ignoring triangulation and you have to pre-coordinate the timing of the transmissions with your partner via pre-shared one time pad and use plenty of error correction) the enemy observer cannot prove that someone is sending signals at all. Maybe no such techniques could ever apply to the internet, but I'm not sure it's proven impossible. You would need a well defined threat model but if you can show that your enemy is working with noisy data and strictly in the digital space, I don't see why statistical de-anonymization couldn't be foiled.
- amelius 10mo ago> Of course, we need to make sure that the data isn't modified on the way from the client. Why is this necessary if every layer of the onion is a trustable encrypted link?
- MzxgckZtNqX5i 10mo agoRelays can be malicious and try to tamper with the data. Think of Tor relay encryption like Signal's E2E encryption, where the relays are analogous to Signal's servers. You want to ensure they can neither see what you sent (confidentiality) nor modify it without detection (integrity).
- amelius 10mo agoYes, but if it's all encrypted tunnels inside encrypted tunnels (recursively), then those relays can't really see the data, right?
- MzxgckZtNqX5i 10mo agoThat is correct. But, (in general) encryption does not necessarily guarantees integrity of the data. In other words, a plaintext can be encrypted, the ciphertext given to another party, and they can tamper with the ciphertext in a way that produces predictable changes in the message obtained by decrypting the tampered ciphertext.
- amelius 10mo agoOk, but if I run (say) HTTPS over the innermost tunnel, then I suppose that HTTPS will take care of any discrepancies.
- MzxgckZtNqX5i 10mo agoYou can indeed use HTTPS with the end server (e.g., accessing Wikipedia). This correctly hides the traffic content from all relays. To reach this point, though, you first need to set up the Tor circuit itself. This is done in a 'telescopic' fashion: the user connects via TLS to the first relay, then sends a message to extend the circuit to a second relay, then to the third (and usually last) relay. Finally, to open Wikipedia, you send a layered encrypted message to the last relay. All this data is link-protected by TLS on the wire, but protected by Tor's relay encryption mechanism while being processed by the nodes.