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1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

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Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#101

Post by rnhmjoj »

slig wrote: post #86
lbenes wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was traveling in China, I would have had no access to Facebook if it weren’t for Tor. All I needed was my USB drive with a Tor + Linux and I could access the free Internet from any computer. Providing anonymity of identity is just one of the many uses of tor. [1] [1] https://www.torproject.org/about/torusers.html.en

Why doesn't China block Tor? Isn't it easy as blocking all known public IP addresses? It doesn't make sense to not allow the user to access certain sites, but allow Tor that can easily bypass that protection.

No, not really: even if you could block all the known tor relays there are still the bridges that are exactly meant for this situation: bridges are like normal relays but their full list is not disclosed so it shouldn't be possible to block them entirely. This is probably what he has been using.

https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#102

Post by SXX »

cm3 wrote: post #92
c22 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They "allocated" the key by using it. Others are not more likely to generate the key they found than any other specific key. This is statistically unlikely due to the extremely huge number of possible keys.

Well, did they generate keys they liked and then tried to use them immediately, hoping nobody had generated the same key in the meantime, or did they generate only keys they would like and "registered" them all but kept just one? If so, what happens to allocated but unused keys? What I'm trying to figure out is: 1. race condition? 2. waste of key space?

1. You can't generate vanity you like, but you can generate billions of keys and choose one you like the most.

2. You can't "register" key. If some person manage to generate key with same vanity he can use same address as facebook, but practically this is nearly impossible. And if that happen this can be easily detected by facebook so they can just change official key.

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#103

Post by m00dy »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #98
nocarrier wrote: post #13

Alec Muffet has done a lot of work to get Facebook running on TOR and he's a true believer. I really enjoyed working with him when I was at Facebook. He also did a lot of work to get .onion domains to be recognized by registrars as a special purpose domain name. This let us issue certificates on .onion. I don't know if the story behind the facebookcorewwwi.onion domain name itself has been talked about much, but we w…

> This let us issue certificates on .onion. Isn't TOR encrypted up to a hidden service anyway? Why would you HTTPS over TOR? Honest Question.

That's true. Exit nodes do not play a role in hidden services. But, Rendezvous point does. So, If your node somehow selected as rendezvous point for meeting, then you could possibly sniff the traffic.

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#104

Post by dchest »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #98
nocarrier wrote: post #13

Alec Muffet has done a lot of work to get Facebook running on TOR and he's a true believer. I really enjoyed working with him when I was at Facebook. He also did a lot of work to get .onion domains to be recognized by registrars as a special purpose domain name. This let us issue certificates on .onion. I don't know if the story behind the facebookcorewwwi.onion domain name itself has been talked about much, but we w…

> This let us issue certificates on .onion. Isn't TOR encrypted up to a hidden service anyway? Why would you HTTPS over TOR? Honest Question.

It is encrypted, but when you're going to facebookcorewwwi.onion you only know that you're connecting to server that knows the corresponding private key, of which "facebookcorewwwi" is a hash. Which is already good. However, seeing EV certificate on this domain also shows you that the corresponding private key for HTTPS connection is signed by a certificate authority: that is, if you trust this CA, you can pretty much trust that you're connecting to Facebook, Inc.

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#105

Post by dchest »

m00dy wrote: post #103
jimktrains2 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This let us issue certificates on .onion. Isn't TOR encrypted up to a hidden service anyway? Why would you HTTPS over TOR? Honest Question.

That's true. Exit nodes do not play a role in hidden services. But, Rendezvous point does. So, If your node somehow selected as rendezvous point for meeting, then you could possibly sniff the traffic.

This is incorrect, exit nodes are not involved with hidden services.

Edit: the original comment I replied to stated that exit nodes could sniff traffic.

Reply to new comment:

The connection is encrypted to the service's public key, what are you talking about? Stop spreading nonsense and go read documentation.

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#106

Post by wormseed »

HeavenFox wrote: post #48
NelsonMinar wrote: post #41

It's funny that they say people use Tor "for a variety of reasons related to privacy, security and safety". They left out "firewall circumvention", which I have to believe is the #1 reason, at least in China.

Unfortunately, it's been a very, very long time since Tor was last usable in China.

With the meek-amazon or meek-azure bridges it works fine, albeit slowly.

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#107

Post by herbst »

m00dy wrote: post #103
jimktrains2 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This let us issue certificates on .onion. Isn't TOR encrypted up to a hidden service anyway? Why would you HTTPS over TOR? Honest Question.

That's true. Exit nodes do not play a role in hidden services. But, Rendezvous point does. So, If your node somehow selected as rendezvous point for meeting, then you could possibly sniff the traffic.

They cant. That is the whole concept behind the word "onion" that they cant.

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#108

Post by herbst »

p4bl0 wrote: post #70
jsprogrammer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that be terrible?

The number of generated key pair to find "facebook" + keywords must have been gigantic, maybe even so much that it could be used as a kind of rainbow table which would allow people (or three letters agencies) who can access it to attack hidden services that use one of the .onion for which a corresponding private key is known.

This was a huge discussion on the Tor blog or subreddit. It was concluded that it is unlikely that they even found one existing key.

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#109

Post by jakobegger »

p4bl0 wrote: post #70
jsprogrammer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that be terrible?

The number of generated key pair to find "facebook" + keywords must have been gigantic, maybe even so much that it could be used as a kind of rainbow table which would allow people (or three letters agencies) who can access it to attack hidden services that use one of the .onion for which a corresponding private key is known.

Nope. They ran a cluster to generate billions of addresses, and used some logic to find a nice one. But that won't help them a bit to find a specific address, since all the addresses they generated are only a vanishingly small fraction of the possible addresses.

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#110

Post by Joof »

zhemao wrote: post #51
50CNT wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which also tends to be the subset of people that have studied abroad, various repatriated huaqiao and college students at some of the more metropolitan colleges and I guess tech people/white collar workers. Cracking down on college students seems like a really dumb idea.

And yet, that hasn't stopped them in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

I think this is a good reminder of why they would want to keep people just barely satisfied. China will go that far, but it's an expensive point to make.
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