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So the FBI knowingly attacked a civilian communications network, potentially causing a great deal of harm to the entire network in order to catch a few bad appl
by Zikes 12y ago
So the FBI knowingly attacked a civilian communications network, potentially causing a great deal of harm to the entire network in order to catch a few bad apples.
Like nuking a city because you're pretty sure you'll get a few bad guys.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 12y agoIf the network can't ensure anonymity against bad actors, it was already fatally broken. If the consequence is improvements in Tor that break the attack, and the cost is a prosecution against someone breaking black-letter law, the result are a net-positive for civil liberties.
- Zikes 12y agoWe can't ignore the potential collateral damage. Even the attempt, due to its inherently indiscriminate nature, is a violation of citizens' fourth amendment rights. By your reasoning we should expect that they can kick in every door in a city looking for a suspect, then blame the doors for being too weak.
- tptacek 12y agoCan you be more specific about the collateral damage you're referring to? I don't understand the argument you're making. Perturbing Tor routing isn't in any way equivalent to kicking down doors. It seems that by your logic, even a title 3 wiretap "kicks down doors", since modern wiretaps happen on packet switched networks and involve filtering out other people's traffic. If the collateral damage you're referring to is loss of trust in Tor, that's not damage: that's new information.
- Zikes 12y ago> According to a Tor blog post, someone during that period was infiltrating the network by offering new relays, then altering the traffic subtly so as to weaken Tor's anonymity protections. By attacking the system from within, they were able to trace traffic across the network, effectively following the server traffic back to their home IP. This is network-wide. They did not and could not target just Silk Road 2 and its users, they sabotaged the anonymity of every user and service on Tor. A title 3 wiretap requires trust in both the government and network operator, which users of Tor may be avoiding for entirely legitimate reasons.
- tptacek 12y agoI'm not seeing the moral distinction between title 3 wiretaps and Tor infiltration. It can't simply be that people on Tor have expressed an unwillingness to be tapped. Every rational actor has that preference in both scenarios.
- Zikes 12y agoEvery rational actor has that preference, but not that expectation. I'm well aware that my ISP can eavesdrop on everything that happens over their network, and can extend that ability to any party they choose. I agree that there is no moral distinction between a title 3 wiretap and Tor infiltration, however a title 3 wiretap is a passive listener while this Tor infiltration is not. The nature of the Tor infiltration caused anonymity to be stripped and readable by anyone aware of the flaw. They used resources unavailable to others to expose that information not only for themselves but to everyone. The equivalent would be streaming a title 3 wiretap sans filter to everyone on the internet.
- tedunangst 12y agoPerhaps you need to update your expectations? Merely expecting Tor to be secure does not make it so.
- tptacek 12y agoIf you go through the exercise of building a mental model of exactly what a title 3 wiretap facility on a packet-switched telephony network looks like, and then carefully study the covert channel traffic confirmation attack the Tor team disclosed and everyone presumes the FBI is using, you'll see that the technical differences are not that great. It's certainly not as black-and-white as "passive" versus "active". I'm not sure I follow the point about how the FBI could have done grave damage to everyone's privacy. It's (hypothetically, assuming this is how the FBI did it) the relay-early traffic confirmation vulnerability that did that. The FBI didn't create that vulnerability.
- JackC 12y agoI'm not sure if this is what Zykes is referring to. But this particular attack on Tor is different from a wiretap because it made traffic readable by the whole network, not only by the attackers. In what I think you mean by a perturbation attack, the attacker would deanonymize traffic by influence timing of packets on one end and observing the other end. Only the attacker learns anything. But in this attack, the hidden service directories found a clever way of broadcasting the name of the requested service, in plaintext, to the rest of the circuit. The attackers could read the message, but so could anyone else running a Tor relay. Given that the message could have been trivially encrypted, that does seem like pointless collateral damage.
- moe 12y agoTor is specifically designed to withstand attacks from resourceful adversaries who do not respect your fourth amendment rights. The FBI putting it to the test provides us with valuable information both about the FBI and about Tor.
- Zikes 12y agoIt didn't teach us anything we didn't already know about the FBI, but it also does not excuse their actions any more than if we were to attack any of their networks.
- moe 12y agoIt didn't teach us anything we didn't already know about the FBI Well, it taught us that the FBI is capable of carrying out a successful attack against Tor. Maybe you knew that already - I didn't.
- mirimir 12y agoIt's common knowledge that the FBI, DEA, etc have typically relied on the NSA for such exploits.
- tptacek 12y agoIt is? Cite a credible source?
- mirimir 12y agoI'm thinking mainly of EFF, Bamford's books, and the Snowden releases. Are you claiming that parallel construction isn't SOP? Reaching way back, why do you think that the Weathermen got a pass in Chicago?
- tedunangst 12y agoThere are at least three levels of claim that can be made here. 1. The NSA passes along tips to FBI. 2. The NSA regularly passes along tips. 3. The FBI relies on NSA tips to do its job.
- tachion 12y agoWhat about the citizens that dont have 'fourth amendment rights' just because they're not US citizens? As far as I know, Tor is not something that 'belongs' to US, nor 'exists' in US soil so it is very interesting what about the rest of the world.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jes 12y agoI agree with your last sentence, as long as the black-letter law that is being violated is itself moral. I question the morality of many drug laws, however.
- __xtrimsky 12y agonuking kills. slowing down a network you are not forced to use? fine by my standards.
- Zikes 12y agoThis isn't about the performance of the network. They could've brought it offline and that wouldn't have been as egregious an affront. They willfully subverted the network to invade the privacy and anonymity of the people using it. Regardless of the purpose, the potential damage to the people using it for any reason is too great to ignore. Political dissidents, whistleblowers, journalists, lots of people rely on Tor, and who knows how much of their information was exposed as a result.
- moe 12y agoIf it's really that easy to subvert Tor then we should thank the FBI for showing us.
- rosser 12y agoIn the case of political dissidents in repressive regimes, compromising Tor can also kill.
- hellbanner 12y agoThere was a DEFCON talk about TOR where the speaker advised "All of my friends and contacts in Israel & the Middle East who didn't use TOR -- I no longer hear from them".
- higherpurpose 12y agoBillions are "collateral damage" in US government's "cyberwar". We even know now that NSA routinely captures botnets and "repurposes" them - anyone remember the Wikileaks DDoS? That one was quite obviously done by the NSA/FBI, but they may do it against other targets as well, in a much more subtle way or even blame it on someone else.
- JohnTHaller 12y agoOver 80% of Tor hidden service visits are related to child pornography.* A 'few bad guys' is stretching things a bit. Additionally, they didn't nuke anything, Tor continued to function, albeit with a wide open security flaw that multiple actors besides the ones mentioned here were exploiting. * http://www.wired.com/2014/12/80-percent-dark-web-visits-relate-pedophilia-study-finds/ http://www.wired.com/2014/12/80-percent-dark-web-visits-rela...
- gwern 12y agoUnder a very uncertain traffic measurement methodology which plausibly biases towards very evanescent .onion addresses.
- Zikes 12y agoAnd over 70% of emails are spam[1], so we should route every email we send through the FBI/NSA? That other 20% of Tor usage may very well be political dissidents, whistleblowers, or average Joes that just don't want half the world watching everything they do and say online. [1] http://www.kaspersky.com/about/news/spam/2013/Spam_in_Q2_2013_More_offices_in_danger_from_targeted_plausible_fakes http://www.kaspersky.com/about/news/spam/2013/Spam_in_Q2_201...
- bigiain 12y ago"That other 20% of Tor usage may very well be political dissidents, whistleblowers, or average Joes that just don't want half the world watching everything they do and say online." Or me, browsing my local government website to check when the next recycling pickup day is. Because I feel some kind of duty to do my bit to make the entirely innocent portion of the haystack bigger...
- frandroid 12y agoThat's a terrible comparison.
- JohnTHaller 12y agoTwo points. First, the comparison of spam to child pornography is a bit... lopsided. Second, every email we send is made available to the FBI/NSA already.
- lotsofmangos 12y agoTor is hardly a civilian network. It is quick and dirty secure communications for intelligence agents, developed by the Naval Research Laboratory. The civilians on tor are doing the useful job of adding routing complexity, which is probably why it was publicly released in the first place, as if it was only agents on there it would be useless for the job.