21–30 of 48 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but if they're under some Kafkaesque gag order there not much they can do right?
I still find it hard to ever trust an institution that wouldn't raise a huge stink about the ethical implications of this. They don't exist to serve "national security interests", that's what the NSA is for.
> Personally, I use it maybe 10, 20 percent of the time. I know that there are people out there that are using it a lot of the time. But for me as much as I might hate Flash, there are times that I need to watch something on YouTube. YouTube has been working for me using Tor Browser for months, if not years.
That was an analogy, not a bug report.
The intelligence community used to value Tor. Remember where it came from. Now they don't, presumably because the primary intelligence target has shifted from fixed actors like nation states and large businesses to the general public. Now those nation states and businesses are 'intelligence partners' in the fight against the 'lone wolfs' hiding within the masses. Perhaps then it is in Tor's interests to restart some…
NSA is schizophrenic in that regard. Remember that one of the things it does besides looking in everyone's underwear drawers is it also advises US govt (3 letter agencies, military) on what crypto to use. In other words it tells Uncle Sam how to lock his underwear drawers so other agencies don't peek in there. It is always interesting to see what they say there. Because if they know, for example, one type of crypto t…
In either case, I feel information assurance and signals intelligence arms really should never have been the same agency: they are roles entirely at odds with each other and do not seem to even have their own governments' equities properly balanced, nor their recommendations always having been given in good faith. So be cautious drawing any conclusions from their advice.
Unfortunately, that is not the sort of 'reform' that either government is interested in, particularly my own. It's quite depressing, really.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be clear, NSL are anti-democratic and wrong. But it looks like they put themselves in that position. Either by voluntary working with the FBI and allegedly taking a $1M grant, and/or doing unethical research by doing it on the live network.
Is it possible for an NSL to order you to conduct your research on the live network? (I mean, I guess it's possible for an NSL to order you to do anything , because America.)
It can only require you to turn over existing records/information.
>... a few weeks earlier had canceled a security conference presentation on a low-cost way to deanonymize Tor users. The Tor officials went on to warn that an intelligence agency from a global adversary also might have been able to capitalize on the vulnerability. This is kind of worrying. I hope the Tor Project has information on the attack is looking into ways to mitigate this. But if it's due to the protocol natur…
The attacks on Tor are largely in the form of:
A) Outright implementation flaws [e.g. Software bugs ]
B) Malicious actors deploying Tor nodes [e.g. On July 4 2014 we found a group of relays that we assume were trying to deanonymize users. They appear to have been targeting people who operate or access Tor hidden services. The attack involved modifying Tor protocol headers to do traffic confirmation attacks. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-security-advisory-relay... ]
> A traffic confirmation attack is possible when the attacker controls or observes the relays on both ends of a Tor circuit and then compares traffic timing, volume, or other characteristics to conclude that the two relays are indeed on the same circuit. If the first relay in the circuit (called the "entry guard") knows the IP address of the user, and the last relay in the circuit knows the resource or destination she is accessing, then together they can deanonymize her. You can read more about traffic confirmation attacks, including pointers to many research papers, at this blog post from 2009:
Pretty much the only defense is to control the entry nodes you use yourself by:
https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#EntryGuards
> Restricting your entry nodes may also help against attackers who want to run a few Tor nodes and easily enumerate all of the Tor user IP addresses. (Even though they can't learn what destinations the users are talking to, they still might be able to do bad things with just a list of users.) However, that feature won't really become useful until we move to a "directory guard" design as well.
Its an inherent problem with a low latency anonymity network that is really an open research problem.
However, controlling your entry nodes has a different problem:
1) It pretty clearly links you to you entering the tor network via a consistent sent of nodes.
2) Capturing these nodes via the DC and warrants/legal action has been done in the past. As any is going to be able to find these nodes since they are no longer randomly selected...
3) Once you are actively targeted you are just as vulnerable.
you've done this to yourselves.
1) For security, most systems rely on their obscurity and on the fact that the assets they protect probably aren't worth much investment by the attackers. Tor can't rely on either of those circumstances: It's prominent and breaking into it is a one-stop solution to attacking many valuable targets.
2) Many organizations with large amounts of resources, from state intelligence agencies to law enforcement to security vendors to ISPs, would like to find solutions to hacking Tor security inexpensively.
3) True security is very difficult and expensive. For Tor, this is taken to an extreme by #2. Does the Tor Project have the resources to implement bug-free software (e.g., the kind that flies passsenger planes)? Certainly not. Can they find and fix bugs as quickly as the attackers described above find and exploit them? Certainly not. I'm not criticizing them; they just don't have the resources.
4) Assuming the underlying concept of onion routing is secure, there still are plenty of targets for attacks such as implementation and all the other code Tor relies on (e.g., almost all of Firefox for the Tor Browser, encryption algorithms, your OS, etc.). Attacking a Tor user doesn't seem impossible.
Based only on the theorizing above, and not knowing about Tor's actual implemenation, I fear that we're lucky if Tor still is expensive to attack. Of course, any smart attacker with an exploit will publicly complain how hard Tor is to hack.
That would be pretty cool, since anyone could prove source correctness automatically.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
NSA is schizophrenic in that regard. Remember that one of the things it does besides looking in everyone's underwear drawers is it also advises US govt (3 letter agencies, military) on what crypto to use. In other words it tells Uncle Sam how to lock his underwear drawers so other agencies don't peek in there. It is always interesting to see what they say there. Because if they know, for example, one type of crypto t…
NSA themselves have used Dual_EC_DRBG (which can be distinguished from a PRF even if you don't have the 'backdoor key': it's not just backdoored and slow, it's bad - and they know that). GCHQ behaves even worse and is at this point almost entirely out of control. In either case, I feel information assurance and signals intelligence arms really should never have been the same agency: they are roles entirely at odds wi…
That actually makes sense because of the way it was backdoor-ed. What they did there is the golden standard of subverting and backdoor-ing a crypto algorithm: go through a standards body, backdoor-ed it by using a public-private key. They hold the private key. Encourage others to use the system as much as they can (which includes showing the world that they themselves use it).
NSA have been having dreams of key escrow forever. It seems since the 90s, that dream was further and further from reality. But they didn't completely give it up. Dual_EC_DRBG was effectively becoming that key escrow they wanted for all the system that used it and they got to keep the private key and thus have a high enough assurance others won't use their backdoor.
Whoever was in charge of that operation, was probably patting themselves on the back every morning after waking up.