Maybe this isn't a new idea. But it seems that more Tor exit points would be a big help. Has anyone made a tool that's both and entry and exit point. You could control the amount of bandwidth exiting. This way the exit points would be more transient - like Bittorrent peers.
Hackers build a new Tor client designed to beat the NSA
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Re: Hackers build a new Tor client designed to beat the NSA
#12I tend to prefer links from the actual researchers if available other than links from news sites. Just a general observation.
Re: Hackers build a new Tor client designed to beat the NSA
#13Maybe this isn't a new idea. But it seems that more Tor exit points would be a big help. Has anyone made a tool that's both and entry and exit point. You could control the amount of bandwidth exiting. This way the exit points would be more transient - like Bittorrent peers.
I think the lack of exit nodes has more to do with legal considerations than actual computational resources/willing volunteers. See the tor blog's Tips for Running an Exit Node with Minimal Harassment - https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tips-running-exit-node-mini...
"Suggest creation of LLC for large exit nodes" I'm guessing that this might be a larger barrier to entry for most willing volunteers compared to hardware and bandwidth costs
Re: Hackers build a new Tor client designed to beat the NSA
#14Isn't the classical solution to this encryption problem to always send packages in the same size at regular intervals. If each host adds a layer of encryption you can't match the packages at the end points. Is this just too expensive? (I'm not an expert so genuine question from my naive POV.)
Re: Hackers build a new Tor client designed to beat the NSA
#15I'm not done reading the paper, but I suspect that astoria clients could be distinguished from regular tor clients at least by the fact that they do not pre-build circuits.
This means that the anonymity set has been partitioned, especially given that the authors say "From our evaluation of Astoria, it is clear that the performance-security trade-off is favorable only in its higher security configurations."
So there is a danger that people who perceive themselves to need higher security and use this client will lose anonymity guarantees as they are mixing with a much smaller group of people who all consider themselves "interesting targets".
The big reason tor is so effective is because they've performed a lot of outreach and gotten different groups to use it, resulting in a large and heterogenous set of users.
Of course, this is still very interesting research, and maybe it will be integrated into the official tor client. I know there have been many discussions of AS-path-based selection in the past.
Re: Hackers build a new Tor client designed to beat the NSA
#16I tend to prefer links from the actual researchers if available other than links from news sites. Just a general observation.
But the summary is easier and faster to read by the general public, and the article puts the reference very clearly in the end, it's good in this case.
Re: Hackers build a new Tor client designed to beat the NSA
#17I tend to prefer links from the actual researchers if available other than links from news sites. Just a general observation.
But the summary is easier and faster to read by the general public, and the article puts the reference very clearly in the end, it's good in this case.
It is. And as a part of the general public I appreciate it. Thank you.
Re: Hackers build a new Tor client designed to beat the NSA
#18I really wish more people and companies would host things on Tor's hidden services, avoiding the entire notion of exit nodes and the cleartext network.
Re: Hackers build a new Tor client designed to beat the NSA
#19"designed to beat" means better, not perfect. Imperfect means eventually it gets beat. The NSA might say what the IRA told Margaret Thatcher, "Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always."
Do you have a specific weakness in the implementation you've found and would like to share? Vaguely pointing out that something is imperfect isn't very useful, indeed, it would be amazing if you told us something was perfect!
I disagree: Highlighting the fact that it's not perfect is terribly useful. Be careful what you use things like this for.
Re: Hackers build a new Tor client designed to beat the NSA
#20The problem is getting Tor itself as per Snowden docs they capture your identifiers for later surveillance so need to Jason Bourne around the city to anonymously fetch Tor.