Attacking Tor: How the NSA targets users' online anonymity • Hacker News Board

Re: Attacking Tor: How the NSA targets users' online anonymity

#121

Post by blake8086 » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 12:16 AM UTC

chakalakasp wrote: post #68

blake8086 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such random advice. What threats are you defending against here? "Wear gloves": Why? Are you thinking someone will pierce the veil of all these other precautions but then be stymied when they find a smashed laptop with no fingerprints on it ? "Sir, we followed him for a year, watched him buy a laptop and use it in a park, but when we recovered the laptop from the dumpster, there were no fingerprints on it!" "…

They find your smashed lappy in the dumpster. "Oh, look, his fingerprints are all over it". There is no national DNA database outside of the penal system (yet) so your dandruff won't do you in. But a print will, if you've ever done something that got you into NCIC. The idea is not to foil people who suspect you, it's to to keep them from suspecting you in the first place. If you are a NSA targeted suspect and you did…

Who is "they", why do "they" even suspect the dumpster? "They" find fingerprints on it, and no hard drive (you used Tails, remember?)

So after all that work, you link a guy to touching a smashed laptop. Not very helpful.

Re: Attacking Tor: How the NSA targets users' online anonymity

#122

Post by im3w1l » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 12:34 AM UTC

gjulianm wrote: post #94

rz2k wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, which admittedly isn't well, it made surveillance jobs easier when its users mistook anonymity and privacy. That is, sending something through the tor network means that it's more likely that your traffic is going through a node belonging to a group that records everything than if your traffic randomly found a point to point route across the internet. I don't see how using the Tor network could ma…

Side note: no intermediate node in the Tor network can see your traffic in clear. They just see the encrypted data. The only node that could see what are you sending is the exit node, but that can be solved easily using HTTPS.

HTTPS is not to be trusted against an NSA-level adversary, since the CA system is too weak.

Re: Attacking Tor: How the NSA targets users' online anonymity

#123

Post by ktr100 » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 12:37 AM UTC

danso wrote: post #14

This accompanying article has useful context: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/nsa-gchq-attack... > But the documents suggest that the fundamental security of the Tor service remains intact. One top-secret presentation, titled 'Tor Stinks', states: "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time." It continues: "With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users,…

On page 5 of the 'Tor Stinks' full document is a clipart picture of a terrorist.

So... Somewhere in the bowels of the NSA is a graphic artist that slaps beards and guns to stock clip-art. fun job.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/04/tor...

Re: Attacking Tor: How the NSA targets users' online anonymity

#124

Post by roywiggins » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 12:45 AM UTC

onedev wrote: post #88

harshreality wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't sufficient. The NSA might be able to query their databases for anyone who recently visited the city where the wifi involved is located, and you might match that if there were license plate scanners on the way, even if you paid for gas in cash. If that information isn't collected by the NSA today, it probably will be tomorrow. The NSA might be able to query their databases for anyone who "went off the grid"…

What if you ran scripts on your phone and computer so that it would appear as if you were browsing the internet and using your computer during your regular usage times? Also using public transportation (and paying for it in cash) will help mitigate the first issue your brought up.

Personally I had the idea a while back for a sort of time-release dead drop. Stuff a Raspberry Pi into a fake power strip, put your seekrit information onto the SD card, and go plug it in somewhere in a city you 'happen' to be passing through, near to a public wifi spot.

Then a year later it wakes up and uploads the data publicly via Tor and self-wipes. Even if it's traced back to the Pi, they'll have to trace the Pi back to you (you bought it untraceably, right?).

Re: Attacking Tor: How the NSA targets users' online anonymity

#125

Post by malandrew » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 12:51 AM UTC

If someone makes disposable Raspberry Pi Tor exit and non-exit nodes sealed in hard plastic resin, we could all buy them and drop them off in random places throughout the world on open networks. If enough people the world over does this, we would make it a lot harder for a global passive attacker to succeed.

Tor's biggest vulnerability is the risk associated with operating exit nodes means that the number of exit nodes remains relatively low at ~1000 worldwide. If hundreds of thousands of exit nodes started popping up all over the globe. It would be very hard to counter.

I'm also curious if enough governments unhappy with what is happening could go as far as hosting many tor nodes outside the control of the NSA. Is the Global Passive Adversary threat still valid if there are many of them that are non-cooperative with one another (i.e. China can't monitor US and Russian tor nodes, Russia can't monitor US and Chinese nodes, and the US can't monitor Chinese and Russian nodes)? My intuition tells me that the global passive adversary would have to be able to monitor most of the nodes, but if others came on the scene doing the same, they would dilute the percentage of nodes that any single global passive adversary could monitor.

Re: Attacking Tor: How the NSA targets users' online anonymity

#126

Post by kintamanimatt » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 1:59 AM UTC

onedev wrote: post #88

harshreality wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't sufficient. The NSA might be able to query their databases for anyone who recently visited the city where the wifi involved is located, and you might match that if there were license plate scanners on the way, even if you paid for gas in cash. If that information isn't collected by the NSA today, it probably will be tomorrow. The NSA might be able to query their databases for anyone who "went off the grid"…

What if you ran scripts on your phone and computer so that it would appear as if you were browsing the internet and using your computer during your regular usage times? Also using public transportation (and paying for it in cash) will help mitigate the first issue your brought up.

Until CCTV is combined with facial recognition!

Re: Attacking Tor: How the NSA targets users' online anonymity

#127

Post by error54 » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 2:16 AM UTC

neves wrote: post #106

I've been playing with vagrant and ansible to create a new server in a snap. Here is a good weekend project: Instead of having just an Tor/browser bundle, build a vagrant machine specification that installs the Tor bundle. This virtual machine would be destroyed and recreated from time to time. Now put the machine specification in GitHub and let anyone use it.

That's a great idea! Please let us know how that goes.

Re: Attacking Tor: How the NSA targets users' online anonymity

#128

Post by mpyne » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 2:21 AM UTC

belorn wrote: post #113

shawn-furyan wrote: post #37

One heartening aspect of the Snowden revelations as a whole is that they have pretty much just confirmed that the things we thought were strong (public crypto research, tor) are in fact strong and the things that we thought were iffy are in fact iffy(Certificate Authorities, Unvetted Crypto, Cloud Services, The Wires, Implementations). This bodes well for the prospect of navigating out of this whole mess successfully…

One iffy part I would like to add is government itself. It was generally thought that government would not keep security vulnerabilities hidden, prioritizing to protect citizens rather than having a minor advantage in hacking. Together with the earlier leaks regarding sabotaged security standard, US government is the most damaging entity to computer security today. Anything they do need to be viewed under the underst…

> That used to be a tin-foil hat idea just a few months ago, and we know better now. If NSA comes carrying gifts, it warrant being very careful in accepting them from a party with such hostile priorities.

Well, not really.

The "tinfoil" idea is that NSA is breaking into crypto so that they can blackmail politicians, black-bag innocent citizens, etc.

But it was never widely assumed that NSA wasn't trying to break every bit of encryption they could. Besides the fact that such activities are literally their job, it's one of the few things they'd just as likely tell you directly if you asked them.

"Q: Are you trying to break cipher/cryptosystem FOO?" "A: Yes, we're trying to break all of them, to protect our SIGINT capability".

NSA has spent literally decades analyzing and breaking the military-grade ciphers of other nations. So I don't know where people got the idea that just because civilians obtained access to military-grade encryption, that NSA would suddenly stop with cryptanalysis efforts. But it has nothing to do with civilians per se; the military and national security opponents are using our civilian crypto too!

Is that inconvenient for civilian cryptography? Sure. But let's not act like people are having something chipped and taken away from them, that they've always had.

Before RSA and DH there was essentially no widely-known safe cryptosystems that we could use. You used DES, or you could make up your own Vigenère implementation perhaps (have fun with key exchange!).

And that's just discussing computer communications. Your phones were all tappable, international telegrams easily read if it suited NSA, and good luck if you used one of those new-fangled cell phones.

The claimed threat is that computers make NSA more capable of surveilling the people at large, but the evidence shows that systems like Tor are putting up an exceptional fight, and even cryptosystems like TLS with many known weaknesses mostly work against global passive surveillance.

You would have to get on NSA's specific shitlist to have to really worry, but being on that shitlist 20 years ago meant anything you said would be picked up... and now, even that is not so certain.

Re: Attacking Tor: How the NSA targets users' online anonymity

#129

Post by mpyne » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 2:26 AM UTC

bcoates wrote: post #104

twoodfin wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it apt? If the genuine national security aims pursued by the NSA can be aptly compared to those of the Gestapo, we're well past the point where it makes any difference exactly what techniques they're using to achieve those aims. If their aims are more reasonable, then, again, what's wrong with a spy agency trying to spy? In other words, the U.S.A.'s national security interests bear little resemblance to those…

In other words, the U.S.A.'s national security interests bear little resemblance to those of Nazi Germany (I can't believe I have to type that). Fine, I'll concede the singular moral uniqueness of the government of Germany from 1933 to 1945. How about the Stasi? The KGB? The COINTELPRO-era FBI? The Star Chamber? These were all arms of governments as legitimate as mine or any other, and their aims were exactly that of…

> When the children of ex-NSA employees lie to their friends that their father left when they were young because the truth would be embarrassing, it will be a better America still.

What the FUCK, man. Is this seriously how you think? Are all of your moral questions so easily placed into neat little bins?

Re: Attacking Tor: How the NSA targets users' online anonymity

#130

Post by mpyne » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 2:33 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #99

twoodfin wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it apt? If the genuine national security aims pursued by the NSA can be aptly compared to those of the Gestapo, we're well past the point where it makes any difference exactly what techniques they're using to achieve those aims. If their aims are more reasonable, then, again, what's wrong with a spy agency trying to spy? In other words, the U.S.A.'s national security interests bear little resemblance to those…

I think a lot of that depends on exactly who's being targeted, and for what reasons. Those revelations haven't made it out yet. The only information we have is the NSA director answering "Not intentionally, no" when asked if the NSA ever spied on American citizens, along with Snowden's allegations that there are no checks and balances if an employee of the NSA believed that they did, and Russ Tice's claim that the NS…

A lot of those questions simply tie back into the age-old debate over capability.

You can talk about checks and balances all you want, but if you hand a "trusted soldier" a rifle he may yet kill many of the wrong people before he can be stopped. Yet people don't typically lie awake at night staring at the ceiling worrying about the local National Guard violating Posse Comitatus and imposing martial law.

But on the other hand the capability still exists, so we do make at least cursory efforts at mitigating this risk. We perform nominal screening of recruits into the military, we keep most weapons locked up in the armory when the soldiers are at garrison, we train soldiers at all levels of where their allegiance lies, what Posse Comitatus means, etc.

So it is with the NSA. Let's say they determine that the NSA needs the ability to perform surveillance, but that Snowden's revelations have demonstrated that better checks-and-balances are needed, even though there's no evidence of "Stasi-like activity", just to be safe. They go and add these required checks-and-balances.... do you still feel ultra-threatened by NSA?