Tor has never been safe to use.
Is Tor still safe to use?
91–100 of 602 posts
Re: Is Tor still safe to use?
#92Here is what I don't understand: Let's say I as a private individual fund 1000 tor nodes (guard and exit nodes included) and have them all log everything. This could cost less than $5000 for a month, with some time needed to get guard node status. I want to find a certain kind of person so I look for people that access a specific hidden service or clearnet url. Surely eventually I'm going to get a hit where all three…
>Surely eventually I'm going to get a hit where all three nodes in the circuit are my nodes that are logging everything? The word "eventually" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Let's say you actually manage to add 1000 servers to the tor network somehow without getting detected. The network currently sits at just under 8000 nodes. For simplicity, lets also ignore that there are different types of nodes and geogra…
You don’t need all the middle nodes. Just the entry and exit, and enough data to do packet timing analysis to correlate them. It’s in fact shockingly easy for a well provisioned actor to trace tor traffic, and this is something the TOR project openly admits.
They’re financed by the US Government after all…
Re: Is Tor still safe to use?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Surely eventually I'm going to get a hit where all three nodes in the circuit are my nodes that are logging everything? If you're looking for static assets, why would you need to see the whole chain? Wouldn't a connection to a known website (page) have a similar fingerprint even if you wrap it in 3 layers of encryption? Does Tor coalesce HTTP queries or something to avoid having someone fingerprint connections base…
? tor reroutes the packets so how would you identify who is visiting who? it's not just 'layers of encryption' it is layers of redirection
If I visit facebook.com it's about 45 requests and 2.5MB of data. Are you saying that if I did that via Tor I would get a different circuit for each request or each individual packet?
Eventually the guard has to send the whole payload to me, right? Wouldn't that look similar every time if there's no obfuscation?
Re: Is Tor still safe to use?
#94Old Ricochet used onion v2, that has stopped working long ago as far as I know, or I am missing something
Re: Is Tor still safe to use?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone would do the thing-to-be-detected (e.g. accessing CSAM) every day, then that 0.14% probability of detection turns out to be 40% for a single year (0.9986^365) or 64% over two years, so even that would deanonymize the majority of such people over time.
That assumes you could run thousands of malicious tor nodes for several years without being detected. Unless you have vast resources and time, this is unlikely.
I can't think of anyone with vast resources and time that would want to deanonymize cybercriminals
Re: Is Tor still safe to use?
#96Here is what I don't understand: Let's say I as a private individual fund 1000 tor nodes (guard and exit nodes included) and have them all log everything. This could cost less than $5000 for a month, with some time needed to get guard node status. I want to find a certain kind of person so I look for people that access a specific hidden service or clearnet url. Surely eventually I'm going to get a hit where all three…
> Surely eventually I'm going to get a hit where all three nodes in the circuit are my nodes that are logging everything? If you're looking for static assets, why would you need to see the whole chain? Wouldn't a connection to a known website (page) have a similar fingerprint even if you wrap it in 3 layers of encryption? Does Tor coalesce HTTP queries or something to avoid having someone fingerprint connections base…
If I don't know the whole chain (or I don't use a timing attack with a known guard and exit node) then I don't see how I'd know who sent the packet in the first place. The person in the chain would connect to a random tor guard node, which would connect to another random node which would connect to my evil exit node. My evil exit node would only know which random TOR node the connection came from but that's not enough to tell who the original person was.
Re: Is Tor still safe to use?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
That assumes you could run thousands of malicious tor nodes for several years without being detected. Unless you have vast resources and time, this is unlikely.
I can't think of anyone with vast resources and time that would want to deanonymize cybercriminals
Top commenter specifically asked about himself.
Re: Is Tor still safe to use?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not just have greater number of relays by default? Internet bandwidth tends to increase over time, and the odds of this correlation attack are roughly proportional to the attacker's share of relays to the power of the number of relays used. So latency issues permitting, you would expect the default number of relays to increase over time to accommodate increases in attacker sophistication. I don't think many would…
If you’re advocating for a bigger network… we need more relay operators. Can’t wave a magic wand. There’s like 8000 relays. Haven’t looked in a while. Or if you were arguing for increasing the number of relays in a circuit, that doesn’t increase security. It’s like one of the OG tor research papers deciding on 3. Bad guy just needs the first and the last. Middle irrelevant.
Any idea what consideration keeps the tor team from making the client also act as a relay node by default?
Re: Is Tor still safe to use?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
After the Snowden revelations regarding FOXACID and QUANTUM going largely undressed in the tor project, people have every right to feel sketched out with using ToR for anything. "We're still helping people" just isn't a good enough argument for most people. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/how_the_nsa_a... https://blog.torproject.org/yes-we-know-about-guardian-artic...
Wonder what has replaced “Xkeyscore” given the wide adoption of TLS. I know ISPs, especially national ISPs like AT&T (see: titanpointe - 33 thomas st, nyc) would feed data to NSA since traffic at the time was mostly via http (rather than https). I suppose the unencrypted dns queries are still useful (although DNSSEC is supposed to defend against snooping/deep packet inspection)
>> Wonder what has replaced “Xkeyscore” given the wide adoption of TLS.
A nationwide invisible firewall, with man in the middle decryption and permanent storage of all unencrypted data. All run by the major backbones and ISPs.
Re: Is Tor still safe to use?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Surely eventually I'm going to get a hit where all three nodes in the circuit are my nodes that are logging everything? The word "eventually" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Let's say you actually manage to add 1000 servers to the tor network somehow without getting detected. The network currently sits at just under 8000 nodes. For simplicity, lets also ignore that there are different types of nodes and geogra…
You don’t need all the middle nodes. Just the entry and exit, and enough data to do packet timing analysis to correlate them. It’s in fact shockingly easy for a well provisioned actor to trace tor traffic, and this is something the TOR project openly admits. They’re financed by the US Government after all…
Tor does have padding defenses to protect against that.
Also, according to their latest blog post on their finances, while it is true they have money from the US Government, that was only ~50% of their income (I think that was 2023). For the FUD part of that comment, see the "U.S. Government Support" section of https://blog.torproject.org/transparency-openness-and-our-20...