4 ms·

hey guys, anyone believes Tor still can provide anonymity to users ? just trying to ask politely.

by m00dy 11mo ago

dannyobrien 11mo ago
broadly 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 11mo ago
  I 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 11mo ago
    There 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 11mo ago
      There'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.
lurker_jMckQT99 11mo ago
hey, would you mind elaborating (with sources)?
jstanley 11mo ago
This FUD comes up whenever Tor is mentioned on Hacker News. The answer is: let's say you think Tor isn't 100% flawless. What are you going to do? Not use Tor? It's better than any other option.
- impossiblefork 11mo ago
  What you'd do is that you'd write a distributed remailer where fixed-size messages are sent on fixed timeslots, possibly with some noise in when it's transmitted, with a message always being sent on its timeslot, even if a dummy message must be sent. I've been writing a system like this in Erlang, intended to be short enough that you can take a picture of the source code and then type it in by hand in a reasonable amount of time, as a sort of protest against Chat Control. I'm not sure I'm going to release it-- after all, they haven't passed it yet, and there are all sorts of problems that this thing could needlessly accelerate, but I've started fiddling with it more intensively recently.
  - zmgsabst 11mo ago
    Don’t things like Freenet do similar? Except that every user is also a node, thereby mixing their personal traffic into a share of network traffic. Or so I understand it.
    - impossiblefork 11mo ago
      I'm not sure. Freenet actually stores information, this is pure communication system. I don't think it uses dummy messages. My target size is also <500 lines, and I think <200 is feasible, whereas Freenet is apparently 192,000 lines.
  - 47282847 11mo ago
    You may be interested in Katzenpost and the research behind it: https://katzenpost.network/ https://katzenpost.network/
    - impossiblefork 11mo ago
ongy 11mo ago
Low stakes (IP violations etc.): absolutely High stakes (military / nation state scale): no

hey guys, anyone believes Tor still can provide anonymity to users ? just trying to ask politely.

by m00dy 11mo ago

hey guys, anyone believes Tor still can provide anonymity to users ? just trying to ask politely.

broadly 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 11mo ago
I 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 11mo ago
  There 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 11mo ago
    There'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.

lurker_jMckQT99 11mo ago

hey, would you mind elaborating (with sources)?

jstanley 11mo ago

This FUD comes up whenever Tor is mentioned on Hacker News. The answer is: let's say you think Tor isn't 100% flawless. What are you going to do? Not use Tor? It's better than any other option.

impossiblefork 11mo ago
What you'd do is that you'd write a distributed remailer where fixed-size messages are sent on fixed timeslots, possibly with some noise in when it's transmitted, with a message always being sent on its timeslot, even if a dummy message must be sent. I've been writing a system like this in Erlang, intended to be short enough that you can take a picture of the source code and then type it in by hand in a reasonable amount of time, as a sort of protest against Chat Control. I'm not sure I'm going to release it-- after all, they haven't passed it yet, and there are all sorts of problems that this thing could needlessly accelerate, but I've started fiddling with it more intensively recently.
- zmgsabst 11mo ago
  Don’t things like Freenet do similar? Except that every user is also a node, thereby mixing their personal traffic into a share of network traffic. Or so I understand it.
  - impossiblefork 11mo ago
    I'm not sure. Freenet actually stores information, this is pure communication system. I don't think it uses dummy messages. My target size is also <500 lines, and I think <200 is feasible, whereas Freenet is apparently 192,000 lines.
- 47282847 11mo ago
  You may be interested in Katzenpost and the research behind it: https://katzenpost.network/ https://katzenpost.network/
  - impossiblefork 11mo ago

ongy 11mo ago

Low stakes (IP violations etc.): absolutely High stakes (military / nation state scale): no