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Is Tor still safe to use?

blog.torproject.org

11–20 of 602 posts

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#12
post #3

For context, here's the NDR report: https://www.ndr.de/fernsehen/sendungen/panorama/aktuell/Inve... And more info here: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2024-Septe... Edit: The NDR alleges a timing attack (no further explanation) that allows "to identify so-called ‘entry servers’" Very little information is actually available on the nature of the attack. The NDR claims this method has already lead to…

Might one mitigating possibility be to use a VPN that uses padded and rate limited packets, so that it is always sending and receiving user_defined bit rate and your real traffic would be traffic shaped to take priority but not exceed the padded streams? Maybe this assumes one is running their own tor daemon on a server somewhere and the vpn terminates on that node. I assume this could be done with tc sch_htb class shaping or perhaps sch_cake and tagging packets with iptables mangle rules and two never-ending bi-directional rsync streams reading /dev/urandom or big random files.

e.g.

    Port 873 (native rsync) bulk traffic, low priority
    Port 3128 (squid mitm ssl-bump proxy) high priority

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#14

The best attack against Tor is convincing people not to use it. If anyone tries to convince you Tor is not safe, ask yourself: cui bono?

Same was true of Truecrypt.

After the core team disbanded there was a full security audit which uncovered some very minor issues.

People never really trusted Veracrypt though. Quite interesting how that turned out.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#15
https://github.com/blueprint-freespeech/ricochet-refresh

...We are writing this blog post in response to an investigative news story looking into the de-anonymization of an Onion Service used by a Tor user using an old version of the long-retired application Ricochet by way of a targeted law-enforcement attack.

...From the limited information The Tor Project has, we believe that one user of the long-retired application Ricochet was fully de-anonymized through a guard discovery attack. This was possible, at the time, because the user was using a version of the software that neither had Vanguards-lite, nor the vanguards addon, which were introduced to protect users from this type of attack. This protection exists in Ricochet-Refresh, a maintained fork of the long-retired project Ricochet, since version 3.0.12 released in June of 2022.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#17
post #14

The best attack against Tor is convincing people not to use it. If anyone tries to convince you Tor is not safe, ask yourself: cui bono?

Same was true of Truecrypt. After the core team disbanded there was a full security audit which uncovered some very minor issues. People never really trusted Veracrypt though. Quite interesting how that turned out.

> People never really trusted Veracrypt though

Can you expand on this? It was my understanding that Veracrypt is the new de-facto standard.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#18
post #5

This isn't written in the most confidence inspiring way But the things that do inspire confidence: Tor is updated against vulnerabilities pre-emptively, years before the vulnerability is known to be leveraged Tor Project happens to be investigating the attack vector of the specific tor client, which is years outdated They should have just said “we fixed that vulnerability in 2022” with a separate article about the ol…

To quote the article. " To the best of our knowledge, the attacks happened between 2019-2021." and " This protection exists in Ricochet-Refresh, a maintained fork of the long-retired project Ricochet, since version 3.0.12 released in June of 2022."

While it has been fixed for years it was not a case of using old software from what I am reading.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#19
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same was true of Truecrypt. After the core team disbanded there was a full security audit which uncovered some very minor issues. People never really trusted Veracrypt though. Quite interesting how that turned out.

> People never really trusted Veracrypt though Can you expand on this? It was my understanding that Veracrypt is the new de-facto standard.

Bitlocker, LUKS and FileVault are the new standard(s).

Veracrypt is a curiousity, not beloved the way truecrypt was.

I’d love to see hard numbers for this, just my outside impression.

In fact, when trying to find old forums that I was part of during that era, I failed; and found only this: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/why-people-still-believe...

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#20
post #14

The best attack against Tor is convincing people not to use it. If anyone tries to convince you Tor is not safe, ask yourself: cui bono?

Same was true of Truecrypt. After the core team disbanded there was a full security audit which uncovered some very minor issues. People never really trusted Veracrypt though. Quite interesting how that turned out.

IIRC there were a lot more options by the time of the Truecrypt-Veracrypt shift. Truecrypt was around when drive encryption was otherwise an expensive enterprise software thing, but I think Bitlocker was included with Pro versions of Windows by the time of Veracrypt so that probably became the easiest free option - and probably with better compatibility as well.
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