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Is Tor still safe to use?

blog.torproject.org

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371–380 of 602 posts

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#371

Post by goodpoint »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #140
oconnore wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could someone like the NSA with limitless resources do it? Quite probably, sure. If you're not worried about a fairly well-resourced government agency uncovering whatever network activity you believe needs to be anonymized, why would you be using Tor at all?

Because you're an enemy of the Iranian, Saudi, North Korean, etc. gov't. Because your ex-spouse wants to murder you. Because you just escaped Scientology, or another cult. Because you're a criminal. The NSA doesn't handle that. Because you're a journalist talking to sources in the industry you're investigating.

Because your ISP is selling your traffic logs.

Because you want to avoid creepy targeted ads.

Because you live in a country that blocks many legitimate websites.

Because you are looking for information about abortion and live in countries like Iran or US

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#372

Post by throawayonthe »

vbezhenar wrote: post #370

Here's imaginary attack with adversary. Just push as much traffic as possible from many hosts to the given hidden service. Now observe traffic metadata from high level network operators. With enough filtering it should be possible to detect where traffic spike is terminated.

[dead]

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#373

Post by loup-vaillant »

ec109685 wrote: post #307
deviantbit wrote: post #290

No. It is not. More than 1/3 of the Tor servers are run by US Federal Govt as does other members of the Five Eyes. Israel has a large number as well. Cases are built backwards or in parallel that are from the fruit of the poisonous tree. If you don't know what that term means, look it up. Use Tor with extreme caution.

Or just hit onion services that don’t require exit nodes.

How is that even possible? Unless you keep to hidden services underneath you do need an exit point to talk to the regular internet.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#375

Post by sigmoid10 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #129
sigmoid10 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, this is obviously the sort of adversary we would be discussing. OP explicitly asked about himself, not some government organisation. >causing your number to be an underestimate Not necessarily. It might even be an overestimate if the attacker fails to supply enough nodes of the right kind. >So almost certainly thousands of people We're talking about a targeted attack. Of course the statistics game works better…

> We're talking about a targeted attack From OP: " I can't target a specific person, but eventually I can find someone who has all three bounces through tor nodes I control, no" > Not necessarily. It might even be an overestimate if the attacker fails to supply enough nodes of the right kind. Assuming they match the existing distribution of nodes, they will only have better results.

That's assuming a lot given the rest of the statement.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#378

Post by throawayonthe »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #373
ec109685 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just hit onion services that don’t require exit nodes.

How is that even possible? Unless you keep to hidden services underneath you do need an exit point to talk to the regular internet.

[dead]

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#379

Post by cookiengineer »

alasdair_ wrote: post #35

Here 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…

The issue that TOR has is that it's a layered routing concept that won't respect ASN based spreading/scattering of traffic.

Circuits are temporary but the traffic is not scattered across the network to make MITM fingerprinting of request/payload sizes/timestamps impossible.

A typical MITM like the FBI surveillance van next door can identify you by observing the network packets and by _when_ they were requested and by _how large_ the payloads were. There was a famous court case where this was enough evidence to identify a user of an onion service, without the FBI having access to the Wi-Fi of the user. But they had access to the exit node logs that were encrypted, the pcap logs to the onion service from that exit node, and the encrypted Wi-Fi packets of the user.

(Also TLS lower than 1.3 and SNI related problems are relevant here, because DNS TTL 0 effectively makes everyone's privacy compromised, shame on you if you set a DNS TTL to 0)

My point is that with more randomized hops across the network and across ASNs it would be less likely that a threat actor can control both guard and exit nodes.

(Assuming that they parse RIR datasets to map organizations across ASNs, which the datasets already provide)

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#380

Post by trompetenaccoun »

giantg2 wrote: post #319
droopyEyelids wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would help negate that interference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

Specifically what I chose US (allies implied), China, and Russia. These should be three competing factions.

Russia and China are allies. And I'm not sure if Beijing would even be interested in spying on TOR users since it's blocked so thoroughly it's basically unusable for Chinese residents.
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