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Tor is specifically designed to withstand attacks from resourceful adversaries who do not respect your fourth amendment rights. The FBI putting it to the test
by moe 12y ago
Tor 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.
- tptacek 12y agoThis doesn't make sense either. LEOs routinely force entry into buildings to execute search warrants. It is not hypocrisy that you'd be prosecuted for doing the same thing without the legal authority.
- Zikes 12y agoI contest the FBI's legal authority in this case due to the indiscriminate and damaging nature of their actions. Warrants and wiretaps are narrow and selective, but this Tor intrusion potentially damaged the anonymity of everyone on the network.
- tptacek 12y agoYou still haven't managed to make a coherent case for how this attack was any more indiscriminate than a wiretap.
- mirimir 12y agoAs I understand this, the CMU team allegedly deanonymized SR2 in the course of their research, and then shared the information with the FBI. Once they had done that, they were allegedly forced to withdraw their Black Hat presentation. There's also the issue that the CMU team had NSA funding. I haven't seen any claims that the CMU team was initially focusing on SR2 and other "illegal" sites. But I wouldn't be surprised by that. If that's what happened, it wasn't a wiretap. It was a tip.
- tptacek 12y agoCMU has had "NSA funding" for something like 20 years; it's the nation's software security "center of excellence", going back to CMU CERT, AKA CERT. This is an especially silly bit of innuendo given that Tor is itself DoD funded.
- mirimir 12y agoThe association of SR2 deanonymization with CMU's withdrawn Black Hat presentation is indeed speculative. But there's arguably more to it than innuendo. Time will tell. It's well known that the DoD has funded Tor from the start. But it's at least decent of them to independently fund CMU to compromise it ;)
- hellbanner 12y ago"Tor does not defend against a global passive adversary" -- TOR developers.
- moe 12y agoglobal passive adversary Knowing that "global passive" might include the FBI is still valuable.
- tedunangst 12y agoI feel like "global passive adversary" is kind of like a True Scotsman. There doesn't seem to be a fixed definition; rather we work backwards from random attacks and determine whether we think they were global adversary worthy or not, and if so then that makes the perpetrator a global adversary. Could Lizard Squad have executed this attack? (I assume anybody with a botnet could start new Tor relays, so yes.) Is Lizard Squad a global adversary?
- derefr 12y agoA global passive adversary is anyone who can execute a Sybil attack, basically. So the required size scales with the size of the network. A global passive adversary for a network with only ten nodes would only have to have five nodes itself. The "global" adjective is just used, I think, because cryptographers presume a production deployment of the cryptosystems they discuss would be something like the Web: large enough (millions of nodes) to require globe-spanning resources (millions of other nodes owned by a single group) to execute the attack successfully. Seen under that lens, neither Tor nor Bitcoin nor any other modern cryptosystem needs a "global" passive adversary to break it. Just a regular "passive adversary."
- jsmeaton 12y agoThat's really interesting. So if there were multiple "global passive adversaries" then the network would become stronger and stronger? At least until one gives up and removes all their nodes at once.