3 ms·
I wonder how vulnerable this approach is to timing attacks similar to the ones you can use to smoke out onion routed machines. If you know the physical and net
by avar 14y ago
I wonder how vulnerable this approach is to timing attacks similar to the ones you can use to smoke out onion routed machines.
If you know the physical and network location of their routing boxes and you keep polling some (e.g. static) resource on their servers you can eliminate all cloud providers that are further away than the response time as being the hidden backend.
Let's say you narrow it down to 10 candidates and 5 of them experience some sort of network issue that gets reflected in the response times of TPB, you've now narrowed it to 5.
I wonder what they're doing to mitigate these sort of timing attacks meant to discover their hidden backend.
- mike-cardwell 14y agoOr you could just look at the network traffic that the load balancers are generating to see where the majority of it is going. I wouldn't bother just taking the load balancers down. I'd go upstream of them to see where the traffic is going, and then take down those hosts at the same time as the load balancers.
- vidarh 14y agoFirst you would need to find the load balancer, which means you would first need to go after their router, then get the cooperation of a second country. Then you would need the cooperation of two more countries to get at the cloud providers... ... only for The Pirate Bay to spin up more instances elsewhere and point a domain or two at it.
- mike-cardwell 14y agoI was just pointing out a method that would be considerably more simple to pull off than a timing attack. I recognise that there are still numerous steps that would need to be taken to pull it off.
- subsystem 14y agoThe point is your still not taking anything of value, the site could be up on different servers and load balancers in a couple of hours, if not minutes. For the record, torrent sites have been doing this for years.
- vidarh 14y agoJust some in-memory caching on the load balancer could make timing attacks pretty useless.
- belorn 14y agoEven if they find them all, they would have to have a system that automatically finds them when they reappear. Imagine trying to detect copyrighted songs from Youtube if users could upload code bundled with the videos and load balance requests. I will assume fingerprints of detected instances will travel between cloud provides, and that pirate bay will then add code to prevent that.
- rorrr 14y agoThey already added it. It's called encryption.