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0 pointstrendia9y ago0 comments

I think that Tor, like Bitcoin, will always be vulnerable if a particularly powerful entity is able to obtain a majority of nodes. (Or, in the case of Bitcoin, a majority of hashing power).

And the more troubling aspect is that the courts have accepted the government's arguments that no warrant is required to disclose IP addresses:

> ... Tor users clearly lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in their IP addresses while using the Tor network. In other words, they are taking a significant gamble on any real expectation of privacy under those circumstances.

If both of these statements are true (that the government could easily run a majority of Tor relays, and that the government does not need a subpoena), then any particular vulnerability being patched is irrelevant to the inherent insecurity of the network.

0 pointstrendia9y ago0 comments

I think that Tor, like Bitcoin, will always be vulnerable if a particularly powerful entity is able to obtain a majority of nodes. (Or, in the case of Bitcoin, a majority of hashing power).

And the more troubling aspect is that the courts have accepted the government's arguments that no warrant is required to disclose IP addresses:

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4 comments · 2 top-level

cjbprime9y ago· 2 in thread

Though note that Tor is also vulnerable to someone who doesn't control a majority of nodes, but can monitor the traffic of a majority of nodes from upstream. This is probably easier to achieve for a global adversary than actual control of the nodes' computation.

This doesn't make it bad software; it's the best we have, and being able to monitor traffic across the entire Internet is a huge ask of an attacker.

nbraud9y ago

Also, remember that the NSA has had that kind of capabilities for a while, yet what came out of the Snowden leaks was “Tor stinks” (read: “We don't know how to break it in any practical sense”).

WilliamDhalgren9y ago

yup. Though apparently they could deanonymize some folks, but couldn't target the users they wanted.

But I'd expect that to change, a low-latency network like tor that also doesn't create cover traffic just architecturally isn't equipped to deal with something approaching a global passive adversary. Though networks for even that can be built..

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WilliamDhalgren9y ago

of course; but that's not tor's threat model anyhow. Nevermind the scenario of being mostly taken over; it also obviously falls to traffic analysis by a global passive observer.

In other words, its not gonna protect you from the NSA, ever, nor was it meant to. It might have a fightning chance against the FBI though. Actually it was surprising how in Snowden's files, the NSA was having trouble reliably deanonymizing targeted tor users.

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