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Law enforcement have for decades been anonymous, wearing plain clothes & hiding behind false identities in efforts to catch criminals. Tor just gives them digit

by derrida 14y ago

Law enforcement have for decades been anonymous, wearing plain clothes & hiding behind false identities in efforts to catch criminals. Tor just gives them digital plain clothes. If they were going through an open HTTP proxy, that box better have a decently network facing attack surface (unlikely). Sure, it's the same deal with Tor, except you have to pwn about 2/3rd of the network (4000+ boxes) before you know about the equivalent of pwning 1 sole proxy. Keep in mind there is a good mix of software, a whole variety of kernels etc. If you have one of the less common architectures around, consider running a Tor node on it :-) Then we get a mix against random machine-code backdoors too.

dmix 14y ago
Another good reason might be because there are a ton of illegal onion sites on Tor that they are investigating.
- derrida 14y ago
  Sure, but that is a newer feature, and Roger Dingledine has been giving these talks to law enforcement for some years (the earliest I am aware of is 2008).
ChrisWoodall 14y ago
>If they were going through an open HTTP proxy, that box better have a decently network facing attack surface (unlikely). Sure, it's the same deal with Tor, except you have to pwn about 2/3rd of the network (4000+ boxes) before you know about the equivalent of pwning 1 sole proxy. Can you go into more detail about what you are saying? I'm sure you could drop a- ADOBE, Active-X, Java, ect- 0-day on a page and pwn said box. You can also send payloads to/from TOR; although there are limited transfer protocols you can use. The whole point of TOR is to try to anonymize you. It's not going to save you from getting owned.
voltagex_ 14y ago
I don't have the bandwidth available, but I'm willing to ship a Raspberry Pi to someone who does. Someone should start the TorPiDo project :P
- derrida 14y ago
  Maybe that someone is you? Join the tor-talk list and just do it :-)

by derrida 14y ago

dmix 14y ago

Another good reason might be because there are a ton of illegal onion sites on Tor that they are investigating.

derrida 14y ago
Sure, but that is a newer feature, and Roger Dingledine has been giving these talks to law enforcement for some years (the earliest I am aware of is 2008).

ChrisWoodall 14y ago

>If they were going through an open HTTP proxy, that box better have a decently network facing attack surface (unlikely). Sure, it's the same deal with Tor, except you have to pwn about 2/3rd of the network (4000+ boxes) before you know about the equivalent of pwning 1 sole proxy. Can you go into more detail about what you are saying? I'm sure you could drop a- ADOBE, Active-X, Java, ect- 0-day on a page and pwn said box. You can also send payloads to/from TOR; although there are limited transfer protocols you can use. The whole point of TOR is to try to anonymize you. It's not going to save you from getting owned.

voltagex_ 14y ago

I don't have the bandwidth available, but I'm willing to ship a Raspberry Pi to someone who does. Someone should start the TorPiDo project :P

derrida 14y ago
Maybe that someone is you? Join the tor-talk list and just do it :-)