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Security professionals have hypothesized many attacks against the anonymity of the tor onion and what you describe is pretty close to one of them. If the NSA w
by theboss 13y ago
Security professionals have hypothesized many attacks against the anonymity of the tor onion and what you describe is pretty close to one of them.
If the NSA was to create tons Tor nodes (enter, exit, and relay), the onion may be broken.
Tor is by no means perfect. It is only obfuscating.
It is easy to see how this is broken if you click the TOR button on this thing and then imagine the TOR nodes say NSA on them.
I think it is more fun to imagine security this way (extremely challenging and like you are protecting yourself from the perfect attacker, and the NSA is a good face to put on the perfect attacker). People don't realize how much trust they are putting in their hosting provider, cell carrier, etc.etc. It's insane.
- derrida 13y agoRun a node to stop this attack working!
- stephen_g 13y agoThere isn't really such category as a tor 'enter' node. Any node can be the first node of the chain, but it has no idea whether it is the first or one in the middle of the chain. Essentially, it's as if the 'entrance node' is running on your computer. That means that no node knows the source of the traffic, and only the exit node knows the destination. For the NSA to effectively monitor Tor, they'd need to run a large proportion of the nodes - one paper thought it would require an attacker to run at least one third of the network.
- theboss 13y agoYes but one third is doable for a perfect attacker with 'unlimited resources'. It would be really interesting to determine how much this would cost
- deadairspace 13y agoDo you have a link to said paper by any chance?
- dweinus 13y agoIf the NSA has the logs of ISPs that carry one third of the world's traffic, couldn't they execute the attack without running any Tor nodes? Or am I misunderstanding the onion protocol?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]