Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

marx.wtf

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–86 of 86 posts

Re: Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

#81

Post by shavanerad »

mdhb wrote: post #51
cedws wrote: post #8

I have suspected Tor has been busted for quite a long time. LE is only using this power selectively for now - the last thing that they want is to scare users away lest they go and build something more secure. The Nym mixnet[0] seems promising but it's still new and unproven. I had an idea a while back to make traffic analysis more difficult by building circuits distributed across adversarial countries. Would like to…

The public tends to have a very strange idea as to a lot of things on this topic while forgetting that TOR itself was actually a department of defence project or NSW I forget originally. If you’re interested in seeing what the next generation of this stuff looks like (although AFAIK is not really known outside of defence contracting circles) take a look at this https://github.com/tst-race/race-docs/blob/main/what-is-…

Tor was originally designed by a mathematician working for the US Naval Research Lab (NRL) to provide a way for MI agents to "phone home" safely from the field. It very quickly became clear that if only mil used it, it created anonymity about as effective as Batman on a rooftop backlit by a spotlight -- you didn't have a name but you knew precisely what the agent was about, and where.

So he persuaded NRL to give the project up to open source. Good thing, too, because he was a math geek but not a cryptographer. The two cryptology doctoral candidates at MIT who took the project over chucked his code, and rewrote Tor from the ground up.

Since it's open source, this can be documented. Getting spooky about it being designed for spooks is a red herring.

That GitHub doc vaguely mischaracterizes Signal -- all Signal ever sees is the connection negotiation metadata. Past that point there are no "servers" involved, or data to be retained for future discovery.

Re: Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

#82

Post by shavanerad »

noirscape wrote: post #7
jagged-chisel wrote: post #2

Is there something new here? I’m under the impression that we knew this kind of thing was possible with enough resources.

Nothing new, and I'm pretty sure these sorts of attacks have been possible and used ever since it's founding. TOR ultimately works like any old relay system; if you control enough nodes, you can effectively decloak people if they happen to connect to only your nodes. Nodes are assigned for connection based on a trust value so all a Nation state would have to do is host enough nodes (relay+exit) and they'd be able to…

There are thousands of relays run by altruistic volunteers. Unless your opsec sucks (i.e. you configure Tor to favor performance and not swap circuits every ten minutes) the opportunity to correlate by malicious nodes is small.

Also, these nodes operated by bad actors are constantly identified and excluded.

Re: Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

#83

Post by shavanerad »

dialup_sounds wrote: post #80
Brian_K_White wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you get to charge anyone else with assinine. If a tool does not perform as designed, all users of the tool have an interest in knowing that, and working towards correcting that. It doesn't matter that there are both good and bad users.

The tool performed as designed. This took a months-long international investigation using social engineering and monitoring of hundreds of nodes to to identify four users that were being specifically targeted. It wasn't some novel attack, it's literally something that has always been possible with enough resources. Ergo, users: don't warrant the resources. Your threat model should not be the same as CSAM site operato…

Most attacks on Tor are through social engineering. Think DPR. Error occurs between keyboard and chair.

Tor can't protect you from terrible opsec.

Re: Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

#84

Post by roastedpeacock »

shavanerad wrote: post #81
mdhb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public tends to have a very strange idea as to a lot of things on this topic while forgetting that TOR itself was actually a department of defence project or NSW I forget originally. If you’re interested in seeing what the next generation of this stuff looks like (although AFAIK is not really known outside of defence contracting circles) take a look at this https://github.com/tst-race/race-docs/blob/main/what-is-…

Tor was originally designed by a mathematician working for the US Naval Research Lab (NRL) to provide a way for MI agents to "phone home" safely from the field. It very quickly became clear that if only mil used it, it created anonymity about as effective as Batman on a rooftop backlit by a spotlight -- you didn't have a name but you knew precisely what the agent was about, and where. So he persuaded NRL to give the…

I was under the impression that the Signal server, if compromised could be utilised to potentially log metadata of communication between contacts. Sealed sender [1] is a feature of the Signal protocol to mitigate overt metadata retention but it may fail against certain correlation attacks.

[1]: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/

Re: Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

#85

Post by Smurfix »

immibis wrote: post #47
jagged-chisel wrote: post #2

Is there something new here? I’m under the impression that we knew this kind of thing was possible with enough resources.

I think the surprising element is that the German government actually deployed enough resources.

They knew that the target had nearly half a million [child ab]users.

That's sufficient motivation right there.

The problem is that once you have the infrastructure you can go after, well, any other random Tor onion service you damn well please, all with a minimum of judical oversight (if any).

Post reply on HN