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The Internet was made by DARPA. Let's stop using it. I am really sick of these arguments. Do you realize how much research goes into Tor and how many universit

by thex86 13y ago

The Internet was made by DARPA. Let's stop using it. I am really sick of these arguments. Do you realize how much research goes into Tor and how many university researchers are associated with it (Cambridge, Waterloo)? Furthermore, can you really think someone like the Tor core developers (Dingledine and Mathweson) can sacrifice their entire reputation just for putting a backdoor? The code is out there. They have a Git repository and they have an active, healthy developer community. It's not like TrueCrypt, where change logs read like, "Minor fixes" and there is no public repository in 2013. Someone should bring proof of the alleged backdoors or just shut up. Because conspiracy theories are not only stupid, they are annoying. This issue has been addressed on the tor-talk list many times. Please show one iota of proof. And I say this as a Tor user who has not only donated to the project but also runs a relay.

rhizome 13y ago
Someone should bring proof of the alleged backdoors or just shut up. Because conspiracy theories are not only stupid, they are annoying. Trust is a funny thing, isn't it? It doesn't respond to demands or browbeating.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  I guess my thinking is this. Tor is open source. If you can show a backdoor, do so. This is why open source crypto is so important these days.
  - rhizome 13y ago
    Open source ain't enough if the standard itself is vulnerable: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_strange_sto.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_strange_s...
    - einhverfr 13y ago
      It's not enough. However you can't have trustworthy software unless it can be audited. That's the key point. The source is there. The standards are there. We know that timing attacks may be possible. The rest is just a matter of audits. Questions are good, but they are just questions until someone looks at the code, the implementation, the design, and the rest and says "here's a problem."
      - rhizome 13y ago
        Sure, but those are questions oriented around implementation. If you go the other way: the standards are vulnerable, then the standards organizations are vulnerable, and the agencies influencing the standards organizations are a vulnerability. That is the flaw that we appear to be experiencing right now (and back in 2007 with Dual_EC_DRBG). When you speak of it only being a "matter of audits," that standard breaks down when there are none possible (or at least available) with these organizations and agencies, and that is the fundamental ingredient that produces suspicion. At the end of the day, though, the distinction I'm drawing is one between technical problems and people problems. However, recent events have taught us that the people problems in crypto are real, where before they had only really been suspected or at least minimized.
        einhverfr 13y ago
        Right, so open standards and open source are important. you have to be able to audit all the way through.
david_shaw 13y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with you that it's incredibly irksome to hear this argument over and over again. I also think, though, that the question isn't completely over-the-top given recent revelations. For example, you state: > Do you realize how much research goes into Tor and how many university researchers are associated with it (Cambridge, Waterloo)? Furthermore, can you really think someone like the Tor core developers (Dingledine and Mathweson) can sacrifice their entire reputation just for putting a backdoor? You're right. But how many university researchers and mathematicians vet the security standards at NIST? NIST doesn't just take the math at face-value from NSA. I don't think that Tor is compromised, but I don't think it's beyond questioning, either.
- XorNot 13y ago
  Questioning is easy. Actually doing some damn cryptanalysis, of the type which would answer those questions - is hard. But you know, way more useful.
- thex86 13y ago
  > I don't think that Tor is compromised, but I don't think it's beyond questioning, either. No, definitely not. Science should never be above questioning, or be subject to fanboyism. My point was -- people keep bringing this argument up time and again but do not bring any proof to the table. The code is out there. Don't you perhaps think that the professors at some of the most reputed universities in the world who research on Tor would perhaps eventually find some alleged backdoor, given the code goes through so much scrutiny? I maybe wrong of course but some proof of this would be good. Honestly. And I am not being sarcastic, I have donated money and if I ever found out that something remotely like this is happening, do you think that people like me or the organizations who fund Tor will give it any more money?
  - lambda 13y ago
    It's not a matter of some backdoor. It's a question of whether the idea is fundamentally sound. You're routing your data through several strangers, who are all volunteers and may be individuals who support anonymity or governments who are trying to break it, relying on them discarding logs in order to preserve your anonymity. Since the data is encrypted, and routed between several nodes, you do have some redundancy in place in case one of the middle nodes is an attacker. However, there are several problems. The data coming out of the exit nodes is unencrypted. Now, everyone advises you to always encrypt anything that will pass through an exit node, but that's not always possible. Some protocols just don't have widely available encrypted versions (like DNS), or even with encryption, where you are connecting to is leaked, as well as some information in things like the TLS handshake that may be de-anonymizing. There are also lots of ways that data can leak at your endpoint. For instance, many programs may make DNS queries that don't go through Tor, so what you are looking up may be leaked. Furthermore, Tor doesn't sent data at a constant bitrate. Someone who can monitor traffic on a large portion of the network can correlate it across points. Finally, due to the nature of routing traffic between several points, a fairly limited number of exit nodes, and the encryption, Tor is fairly slow. So most people won't really be able to use it on a day to day basis, making mere use of it somewhat suspicious, and likely to subject you to more scrutiny. None of these are fatal flaws, but they are some fundamental weaknesses, and many of them can't really be fully fixed. I think that focusing on widespread, end-to-end encryption, rather than anonymity service like Tor, would be more valuable. Yes, you will still be vulnerable to metadata monitoring, which is a problem, but it would help a lot more with the content of your communications.
ryguytilidie 13y ago
Because conspiracy theories are not only stupid, they are annoying. This issue has been addressed on the tor-talk list many times. Please show one iota of proof. Isn't this exactly what someone would have said about the NSA spying on us even just a few months back? Did we learn from that AT ALL or just anytime we don't like a theory we will call that person a tin foil hat wearing nutcase?
- eksith 13y ago
  The NSA spying was just theory until proof was presented. Proof is the only thing that differentiates tin-foil wearing conjecture and fact. And until we have just such evidence for a backdoor in Tor (maybe another leak?) all we have is just idle speculation of what if this and that etc... This story is neither helpful nor enlightening in that regard as it has no evidence. Just mere speculation and insinuation.
  - hackinthebochs 13y ago
    This is the wrong conclusion to take from the NSA spying revelations. The proper conclusion is that anything that cannot be independently verified is suspect and to not put an inordinate amount of trust into any single system. With motivated and well funded adversaries like the NSA, there is no such thing as too paranoid. There is value in discussing these conspiracy theories, if only to disseminate information and allow others to determine their own risk assessment. The conflict of interest inherent in a law enforcement agency funding a tool for circumventing detection is enough to raise alarm bells for some classes of users.
- Clanan 13y ago
  I don't think his comment is as extreme as calling people nutcases. Have recent events encouraged us to distrust other entities? Yes. But, as the parent alludes, it's important to temper distrust with investigation and facts and not just blindly run away from everything. Otherwise even more damage will be done.
  - ryguytilidie 13y ago
subsystem 13y ago
"The Internet was made by DARPA. Let's stop using it." A lot of companies probably should, or at least severely limit its use.
- advice4u 13y ago
  What companies do you have in mind?
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Well, Facebook certainly stands to lose a lot of their databases are compromised, so they should probably add an air-gap.
    - MichaelGG 13y ago
      For which databases? If there's an air gap, barring WiFi or other radio or laser transmissions, how would they respond to user requests? Isn't the majority of FB's data like, actually used by Internet users?
      - sliverstorm 13y ago
        how would they respond to user requests? By realizing my comment was tongue-in-cheek ;)
ballard 13y ago
Exactly. This pattern of reporting is tinfoil FUD. I would like to see these stories not hit on HN because of the low-signal fearmongering. 'pg: Find a way to make it stop or I will use HN less and less.
- MrMan 13y ago
  Like, the site owner is your personal genie? Can he clear up my FUD at the loss of my liberties too? '0& make it stop so I can go back to making money!
- Cyranix 13y ago
  Not his problem, and not a particularly significant downside if he doesn't follow through. A better response for you would be to upvote articles you think are better HN material.
  - ballard 13y ago
    It is 'pgs problem if he wants HN to stay good. This requires more people NOT upvoting shitty articles and upvoting good ones. The problem of HN is that equally-ranked votes dilutes signal.
    - MichaelGG 13y ago
      Once you have enough karma, you can flag articles. It's my understanding flags are not equal weighted with votes.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  >Find a way to make it stop or I will use HN less and less. This might work on your mother, but is less effective on people who don't care about you.
  - ballard 13y ago
    Thank god. Stalkers are a bitch to get rid of.
jaekwon 13y ago
If you know anything about research into Tor then you should be aware of the insecurities of Tor with regards to passive traffic analysis. Here's just one such paper. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/oakland05torta.pdf http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/oakland05torta.pdf You don't need backdoors in the program to make Tor less anonymous. You work with traffic patterns & other information gleaned from the network. You can also congest the network & find out more information that way. Tor is useful but you're kidding yourself if you think it protects you from the NSA. And please, shut up about conspiracy theories. Many of these theories have become verified fact, and the rest are up to bayesian judgement. You should brush up on your history starting circa WWII & learn to what extent the intelligence communities go to have an upper hand. Tor is low hanging fruit compared to breaking certain cryptographic primitives.
- papaf 13y ago
  I agree 100% with your post but I want to point out one thing for completeness. I believe nobody sensible involved in Tor would claim it provides strong anonymity. Anonymous networks are a trade-off between efficiency and anonymity. Because it is efficient enough to allow web browsing, Tor provides relatively weak anonymity.
  - MichaelGG 13y ago
    What's stopping an individual Tor user from selecting 5 hops instead of 3? Or a random number of hops between 4 and 8? (Besides the sacrifice in performance, of course.) In the current environment, wouldn't even going to 4 hops prevent analysis, as current analysis tools are going to be set for the default implementation?
hershel 13y ago
We know that dingelidine has been working on mixmaster, a next generation email anonymity tool. If successfully we might had something immune to the nsa, at least theoretically. But he is working on Tor, which can be attacked by global passive attackers, something that in past consider very unlikely to exist. We know today nsa is a global passive attacker. And today, mixmaster still hasn't been working, and the size of email anonymity networks is so small, to be useless. It all worked out very nicely for the nsa. And what, they just got lucky? No conspiracy?
e40 13y ago
It's not like TrueCrypt, where change logs read like, "Minor fixes" and there is no public repository in 2013. I was thinking of just this the other day. In light of all the recent news, what's people's feeling about TrueCrypt. Elaborate ruse by the NSA or really good software that is very secure?
neurostimulant 13y ago
> And I say this as a Tor user who has not only donated to the project but also runs a relay. Just curious, where do you run your relay? Is it under your home internet connection? Does it ever give you any trouble (authorities come knocking the door, etc)?
grandalf 13y ago
The cheapest way for any government to attack tor would simply be to co-opt a few of the engineers. Low risk since individual people routinely have personal, criminal, or financial situations that make them vulnerable to bribes and/or threats.

by thex86 13y ago

rhizome 13y ago

Someone should bring proof of the alleged backdoors or just shut up. Because conspiracy theories are not only stupid, they are annoying. Trust is a funny thing, isn't it? It doesn't respond to demands or browbeating.

einhverfr 13y ago
I guess my thinking is this. Tor is open source. If you can show a backdoor, do so. This is why open source crypto is so important these days.
- rhizome 13y ago
  Open source ain't enough if the standard itself is vulnerable: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_strange_sto.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_strange_s...
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    It's not enough. However you can't have trustworthy software unless it can be audited. That's the key point. The source is there. The standards are there. We know that timing attacks may be possible. The rest is just a matter of audits. Questions are good, but they are just questions until someone looks at the code, the implementation, the design, and the rest and says "here's a problem."
    - rhizome 13y ago
      Sure, but those are questions oriented around implementation. If you go the other way: the standards are vulnerable, then the standards organizations are vulnerable, and the agencies influencing the standards organizations are a vulnerability. That is the flaw that we appear to be experiencing right now (and back in 2007 with Dual_EC_DRBG). When you speak of it only being a "matter of audits," that standard breaks down when there are none possible (or at least available) with these organizations and agencies, and that is the fundamental ingredient that produces suspicion. At the end of the day, though, the distinction I'm drawing is one between technical problems and people problems. However, recent events have taught us that the people problems in crypto are real, where before they had only really been suspected or at least minimized.
      - einhverfr 13y ago
        Right, so open standards and open source are important. you have to be able to audit all the way through.

david_shaw 13y ago

I wholeheartedly agree with you that it's incredibly irksome to hear this argument over and over again. I also think, though, that the question isn't completely over-the-top given recent revelations. For example, you state: > Do you realize how much research goes into Tor and how many university researchers are associated with it (Cambridge, Waterloo)? Furthermore, can you really think someone like the Tor core developers (Dingledine and Mathweson) can sacrifice their entire reputation just for putting a backdoor? You're right. But how many university researchers and mathematicians vet the security standards at NIST? NIST doesn't just take the math at face-value from NSA. I don't think that Tor is compromised, but I don't think it's beyond questioning, either.

XorNot 13y ago
Questioning is easy. Actually doing some damn cryptanalysis, of the type which would answer those questions - is hard. But you know, way more useful.
thex86 13y ago
> I don't think that Tor is compromised, but I don't think it's beyond questioning, either. No, definitely not. Science should never be above questioning, or be subject to fanboyism. My point was -- people keep bringing this argument up time and again but do not bring any proof to the table. The code is out there. Don't you perhaps think that the professors at some of the most reputed universities in the world who research on Tor would perhaps eventually find some alleged backdoor, given the code goes through so much scrutiny? I maybe wrong of course but some proof of this would be good. Honestly. And I am not being sarcastic, I have donated money and if I ever found out that something remotely like this is happening, do you think that people like me or the organizations who fund Tor will give it any more money?
- lambda 13y ago
  It's not a matter of some backdoor. It's a question of whether the idea is fundamentally sound. You're routing your data through several strangers, who are all volunteers and may be individuals who support anonymity or governments who are trying to break it, relying on them discarding logs in order to preserve your anonymity. Since the data is encrypted, and routed between several nodes, you do have some redundancy in place in case one of the middle nodes is an attacker. However, there are several problems. The data coming out of the exit nodes is unencrypted. Now, everyone advises you to always encrypt anything that will pass through an exit node, but that's not always possible. Some protocols just don't have widely available encrypted versions (like DNS), or even with encryption, where you are connecting to is leaked, as well as some information in things like the TLS handshake that may be de-anonymizing. There are also lots of ways that data can leak at your endpoint. For instance, many programs may make DNS queries that don't go through Tor, so what you are looking up may be leaked. Furthermore, Tor doesn't sent data at a constant bitrate. Someone who can monitor traffic on a large portion of the network can correlate it across points. Finally, due to the nature of routing traffic between several points, a fairly limited number of exit nodes, and the encryption, Tor is fairly slow. So most people won't really be able to use it on a day to day basis, making mere use of it somewhat suspicious, and likely to subject you to more scrutiny. None of these are fatal flaws, but they are some fundamental weaknesses, and many of them can't really be fully fixed. I think that focusing on widespread, end-to-end encryption, rather than anonymity service like Tor, would be more valuable. Yes, you will still be vulnerable to metadata monitoring, which is a problem, but it would help a lot more with the content of your communications.

ryguytilidie 13y ago

Because conspiracy theories are not only stupid, they are annoying. This issue has been addressed on the tor-talk list many times. Please show one iota of proof. Isn't this exactly what someone would have said about the NSA spying on us even just a few months back? Did we learn from that AT ALL or just anytime we don't like a theory we will call that person a tin foil hat wearing nutcase?

eksith 13y ago
The NSA spying was just theory until proof was presented. Proof is the only thing that differentiates tin-foil wearing conjecture and fact. And until we have just such evidence for a backdoor in Tor (maybe another leak?) all we have is just idle speculation of what if this and that etc... This story is neither helpful nor enlightening in that regard as it has no evidence. Just mere speculation and insinuation.
- hackinthebochs 13y ago
  This is the wrong conclusion to take from the NSA spying revelations. The proper conclusion is that anything that cannot be independently verified is suspect and to not put an inordinate amount of trust into any single system. With motivated and well funded adversaries like the NSA, there is no such thing as too paranoid. There is value in discussing these conspiracy theories, if only to disseminate information and allow others to determine their own risk assessment. The conflict of interest inherent in a law enforcement agency funding a tool for circumventing detection is enough to raise alarm bells for some classes of users.
Clanan 13y ago
I don't think his comment is as extreme as calling people nutcases. Have recent events encouraged us to distrust other entities? Yes. But, as the parent alludes, it's important to temper distrust with investigation and facts and not just blindly run away from everything. Otherwise even more damage will be done.
- ryguytilidie 13y ago

subsystem 13y ago

"The Internet was made by DARPA. Let's stop using it." A lot of companies probably should, or at least severely limit its use.

advice4u 13y ago
What companies do you have in mind?
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Well, Facebook certainly stands to lose a lot of their databases are compromised, so they should probably add an air-gap.
  - MichaelGG 13y ago
    For which databases? If there's an air gap, barring WiFi or other radio or laser transmissions, how would they respond to user requests? Isn't the majority of FB's data like, actually used by Internet users?
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      how would they respond to user requests? By realizing my comment was tongue-in-cheek ;)

ballard 13y ago

Exactly. This pattern of reporting is tinfoil FUD. I would like to see these stories not hit on HN because of the low-signal fearmongering. 'pg: Find a way to make it stop or I will use HN less and less.

MrMan 13y ago
Like, the site owner is your personal genie? Can he clear up my FUD at the loss of my liberties too? '0& make it stop so I can go back to making money!
Cyranix 13y ago
Not his problem, and not a particularly significant downside if he doesn't follow through. A better response for you would be to upvote articles you think are better HN material.
- ballard 13y ago
  It is 'pgs problem if he wants HN to stay good. This requires more people NOT upvoting shitty articles and upvoting good ones. The problem of HN is that equally-ranked votes dilutes signal.
  - MichaelGG 13y ago
    Once you have enough karma, you can flag articles. It's my understanding flags are not equal weighted with votes.
pessimizer 13y ago
>Find a way to make it stop or I will use HN less and less. This might work on your mother, but is less effective on people who don't care about you.
- ballard 13y ago
  Thank god. Stalkers are a bitch to get rid of.

jaekwon 13y ago

If you know anything about research into Tor then you should be aware of the insecurities of Tor with regards to passive traffic analysis. Here's just one such paper. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/oakland05torta.pdf http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/oakland05torta.pdf You don't need backdoors in the program to make Tor less anonymous. You work with traffic patterns & other information gleaned from the network. You can also congest the network & find out more information that way. Tor is useful but you're kidding yourself if you think it protects you from the NSA. And please, shut up about conspiracy theories. Many of these theories have become verified fact, and the rest are up to bayesian judgement. You should brush up on your history starting circa WWII & learn to what extent the intelligence communities go to have an upper hand. Tor is low hanging fruit compared to breaking certain cryptographic primitives.

papaf 13y ago
I agree 100% with your post but I want to point out one thing for completeness. I believe nobody sensible involved in Tor would claim it provides strong anonymity. Anonymous networks are a trade-off between efficiency and anonymity. Because it is efficient enough to allow web browsing, Tor provides relatively weak anonymity.
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  What's stopping an individual Tor user from selecting 5 hops instead of 3? Or a random number of hops between 4 and 8? (Besides the sacrifice in performance, of course.) In the current environment, wouldn't even going to 4 hops prevent analysis, as current analysis tools are going to be set for the default implementation?

hershel 13y ago

We know that dingelidine has been working on mixmaster, a next generation email anonymity tool. If successfully we might had something immune to the nsa, at least theoretically. But he is working on Tor, which can be attacked by global passive attackers, something that in past consider very unlikely to exist. We know today nsa is a global passive attacker. And today, mixmaster still hasn't been working, and the size of email anonymity networks is so small, to be useless. It all worked out very nicely for the nsa. And what, they just got lucky? No conspiracy?

e40 13y ago

It's not like TrueCrypt, where change logs read like, "Minor fixes" and there is no public repository in 2013. I was thinking of just this the other day. In light of all the recent news, what's people's feeling about TrueCrypt. Elaborate ruse by the NSA or really good software that is very secure?

neurostimulant 13y ago

> And I say this as a Tor user who has not only donated to the project but also runs a relay. Just curious, where do you run your relay? Is it under your home internet connection? Does it ever give you any trouble (authorities come knocking the door, etc)?

grandalf 13y ago

The cheapest way for any government to attack tor would simply be to co-opt a few of the engineers. Low risk since individual people routinely have personal, criminal, or financial situations that make them vulnerable to bribes and/or threats.