Comment by sigmoid10

Comment by sigmoid10 a day ago

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>Surely eventually I'm going to get a hit where all three nodes in the circuit are my nodes that are logging everything?

The word "eventually" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Let's say you actually manage to add 1000 servers to the tor network somehow without getting detected. The network currently sits at just under 8000 nodes. For simplicity, lets also ignore that there are different types of nodes and geographical considerations and instead just ask what is the probability that someone randomly chooses three nodes that you own. The answer is less than 0.14%. If that someone decided to use 4 nodes to be extra-safe, that number goes down to 0.015%. And it decreases exponentially for every additional relay he adds. Combine this with the fact that tor nodes are actively monitored and regularly vetted for malicious behaviour[1], and these attacks become increasingly difficult. Could someone like the NSA with limitless resources do it? Quite probably, sure. But could you or any other random guy do it? Almost certainly not.

[1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/team/-/wiki...

Edit: For all the cynics and doomsayers here, consider this: Tor has been around for a long time, but there has never been an uptick in arrests that could be correlated to cracking the core anonymity service. If you look closely at the actual high profile cases where people got busted despite using tor, these people always made other mistakes that led authorities to them.

throwaway37821 a day ago

75% [0] of all Tor nodes are hosted within 14 Eyes [1] countries, so it would actually be quite trivial for the NSA to de-anonymize a Tor user.

It baffles me that Tor Browser doesn't provide an easy way to blacklist relays in those countries.

[0] Here, you can do the math yourself: https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#aggregate/all

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Fourteen_Eyes

> Edit: For all the cynics and doomsayers here, consider this: Tor has been around for a long time, but there has never been an uptick in arrests that could be correlated to cracking the core anonymity service. If you look closely at the actual high profile cases where people got busted despite using tor, these people always made other mistakes that led authorities to them.

Maybe someone, somewhere, has decided that allowing petty criminals to get away with their crimes is worth maintaining the illusion that Tor is truly private.

It's also worth noting that it's significantly easier to find the mistakes someone has made that could lead to their identity if you already know their identity.

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  • majorchord 12 hours ago

    > Maybe someone, somewhere, has decided that allowing petty criminals to get away with their crimes is worth maintaining the illusion that Tor is truly private.

    This is what I believe. If they do have a way to track people, it wouldn't be worth blowing their cover for small stuff that wasn't a ridiculously huge national security threat that they could afford to throw away 20+ years of work for.

    In fact there have been court cases that were thrown out because the government refused to reveal how their information was obtained... I think that usually means they're hiding it on purpose for a bigger cause. I also wouldn't be surprised if multiple SSL CAs are secretly compromised for the same reason.

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  • keepamovin 19 hours ago

    The original purpose of TOR was to provide agents and handlers with a means of secure communication, allowing them to organize subversive or espionage activities. It was created by the Department of Defense to propagate their interests and spread democracy around the world using these secure capabilities. Given this context, it's not unreasonable to assume that TOR is still being used in a similar manner today.

    Because of its origins, access to the identities of users on the TOR network—even if they could be de-anonymized—would likely be extremely restricted, compartmentalized, and classified. This would make it much more difficult for such information to be used in law enforcement proceedings. Perhaps that, rather than a technical limitation, is the reason most high-profile arrests related to TOR involve criminals making some other mistake, rather than the security of the network itself being compromised.

    Additionally, it’s interesting to speculate that some of the secure private defense and intelligence networks—parallel or classified world internets—could themselves be implemented as possibly enhanced forms of TOR. It would make sense that nation-states, through shell companies and other disguises, might run and control many seemingly innocuous machines acting as secure relays in these parallel networks. While I have no data to back this up, it seems logical, given that TOR was originally created by the DoD and then open-sourced.

    Why wouldn’t they keep something that works, build on it, and enhance it as a means to secure their own global communications?

    Reply View 13 replies
    • Xelbair 16 hours ago

      >spread democracy

      i have to say that i love that phrase, it is peak propaganda that just works.

      Reply View 2 replies
      • keepamovin 12 hours ago

        Yes, I boldly inserted that deliberately aware of its potential provocative effect. So I am truly glad you derive some enjoyment from it. I did too! Comrades in arms? Or at least in Internet nodding hahaha! :)

        Reply View 1 reply
        • Aerbil313 10 hours ago

          Indeed old timer commies of HN might get irritated by that phrase, but in this corner of the world we love Democracy. This summer would pretty dry in my region because of global warming, but thanks to Democracy we had plenty of precipitation in the form of MK-84s. I wonder which neighboring country is going to get her share next year, it's a gift that never stopped giving since some 20 years.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_terror

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    • autoexec 12 hours ago

      > Perhaps that, rather than a technical limitation, is the reason most high-profile arrests related to TOR involve criminals making some other mistake, rather than the security of the network itself being compromised.

      I have no doubt that the government doesn't want to demonstrate how weak Tor is to the public, but it's also got to be dead simple to find those kinds of "other mistakes" they can use when they've identified the person they're looking for and can monitor whatever they do.

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      • keepamovin 12 hours ago

        What you’re claiming is not necessarily correct, but it’s an avenue of interesting speculation. Nevertheless, let’s clarify a few of your possible misunderstandings or points of confusion:

        I’m not saying TOR is weak, nor that the reason for its concealment is to project a false sense of government strength.

        What I am saying—and what you seem to have misunderstood—is that the TOR network is most likely used, precisely because of its strength, for highly sensitive clandestine operations. This results in blanket classification of all involved identities, making them inaccessible to law enforcement. Law enforcement likely understands this, which is why they don’t pursue it—knowing it’s a dead end. Instead, they rely on side-channel effects or mistakes made by criminals.

        To my mind, this explains the public information we see.

        Now that I’ve clarified, what do you think?

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    • jrochkind1 14 hours ago

      > The original purpose of TOR was to provide agents and handlers with a means of secure communication, allowing them to organize subversive or espionage activities. It was created by the Department of Defense to propagate their interests and spread democracy around the world using these secure capabilities.

      Do you think the EFF was in on it, duped, or just thought multiple competing interests could be served?

      Reply View 1 reply
      • keepamovin 12 hours ago

        Well, I could be wrong historically here, but I think you need to recall a previous age where the interests of the state department pushing noble American values into disintegrating but strategically valuable locales might actually have been something that the EFF felt highly aligned with and wanted to support through its electronic and advocacy Capacities. For instance, why would they not support Internet and communicative freedom under a repressive regime?

        I haven’t looked closely and I wasn’t there at the time so it makes it hard to say for sure but let’s speculate. I think the people involved in EFF are most likely slightly cynical, savvypolitical maneuverers themselve who, like you said realize the utility of multiple not necessarily overlapping objectives, where all involved parties could derive some benefits.

        Certainly not an implausible situation that you lay out

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    • DrillShopper 15 hours ago

      After talking to my Democracy Officer I have to say I love managed democracy!

      Reply View 1 reply
    • headsupernova 16 hours ago

      Ah yes, 'spread democracy around the world'

      Reply View 1 reply
      • keepamovin 12 hours ago

        I appreciate your appreciation of that statement. Thank you. :)

        Reply View 0 replies
  • DabbyDabberson a day ago

    Its important to realize that TOR is primarily funded and controlled by the US Navy. The US benefits from the TOR being private.

    It provides a channel for operatives to exfiltrate data out of non-NATO countries very easily.

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    • firen777 a day ago

      > It provides a channel for operatives to exfiltrate data out of non-NATO countries very easily.

      I'm not convinced this is the case. For example China's gfw has been very effective at blocking TOR traffic, and any TOR connection in other countries is like announcing to the government that you are suspicious.

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      • snowwrestler a day ago

        It’s a little silly to say “for example” and then intentionally pick what is widely known as the most sophisticated and pervasive system for controlling Internet traffic ever created.

        The parent said “non-NATO countries”… there are 162 of those that are not China.

        (It’s also a little silly to specify “non-NATO” since U.S. intelligence services have to exfiltrate data from NATO countries too…)

        To get data out of China, the U.S. undoubtedly has special systems, which are worth the special investment because it’s China.

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        • rvba 14 hours ago

          If weight it by population and importance then China is probably in the top though.

          I bet western spies spend more time on China than some micro island in the middle of the ocean. Same for Chinese spies probably focus on USA first.

          Also realistically probably everyone spies everyone and they spy on those micro islands too. But priorities are clear...

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      • literallycancer a day ago

        How do they see TOR traffic in a TLS tunnel?

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        • GuB-42 a day ago

          If you can find TOR nodes, so can the Chinese government. They can then just block these addresses.

          Furthermore, the great firewall is quite advanced, they use machine learning techniques to detect patterns, so even if it is TLS on port 443, they may be able to detect it after they have gathered enough traffic. There are workarounds of course, but it is not as simple as just using a TLS tunnel.

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    • try_the_bass a day ago

      > The US benefits from the TOR being private.

      Slight correction: The US benefits from TOR being private to _everyone but the US_

      Reply View 2 replies
      • wheelerwj a day ago

        I’m glad I didn’t have to scroll too far to see your comment.

        In fact, A major power wins by creating a mote just big enough that only they can cross.

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        • fuzztester a day ago

          everybody does such shenanigans, bro.

          you don't have to be a major power to do such stunts.

          everybody and their uncle are already doing it. look into your life to see the truth of this.

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    • godelski a day ago

        > the US Navy
      Tor was made for spies. But you know what's really bad for spies? If accessing a certain IP/protocol/behavior reliably reveal your spy status.

      For Tor to be effective for hiding spies it has to be used by the public. Even if it's only nefarious actors (say spies + drug dealers + terrorists) it adds noise that the adversary needs to sort through.

      What I fucking hate about many of these conspiracies is how silly it is once you ever work with or for any government entities. You can't get two police agencies in neighboring cities to communicate with one another. The bureaucrats are fucking slow as shit and egotistical as fuck.

      It's important to remember that the government and even a single agency (like the NSA) is just as chaotic, disconnected, and full of competing entities as any big tech company has (if not worse). Yeah, most of the NSA is focused offense, but there's groups working on defense. Those groups are 100% at odds. This is true for the 18 intelligence agencies. They have different objectives and many times they are at odds with one another and you bet each one wants to be getting credit for anything.

      The US involvement should warrant suspicion and with any technology like Tor you should always be paranoid. But it's not proof. Because guess what, the US wants people in other countries to use high levels of encryption to hide from their authoritarian governments while the US can promote democracy movements and help put a friendly leader into a position of power. AT THE SAME TIME they also want to spy on their own people (and there are plenty of people in the gov that don't want this). Inconsistency is the default because it's a bunch of different people with different objectives. So the US gov both wants Tor to be secure and broken at the same time.

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      • autoexec 12 hours ago

        > It's important to remember that the government and even a single agency (like the NSA) is just as chaotic, disconnected, and full of competing entities as any big tech company has (if not worse).

        And yet even as early as 2003 they were taking a copy of every single bit that ran over the AT&T backbone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A). It's amazing how effective these "chaotic, disconnected, and full of competing entities" can be. We're entirely dependent on whistleblowers willing to risk their lives and freedom to learn about what they're doing to us.

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        • godelski 9 hours ago

          Yes, they can be very effective. There's no denying that. The proof is in the pudding as they say, since we have governments and businesses. But that's tangential to the point I was making.

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    • majorchord 12 hours ago

      You know what else was funded by the US government? Computers, the Internet and GPS. Also Signal (via OTF funded by Congress).

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    • HDThoreaun a day ago

      I dont see how TOR is better than just spinning up a server on the public cloud for each asset. Since each asset would have a different IP they couldnt use one assets knowledge to catch the others. Non-NATO countries tend to monitor internet traffic and so would know if you access TOR.

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      • DrillShopper 15 hours ago

        Servers in the public cloud are a lot easier to do traffic analysis on.

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  • amy-petrik-214 a day ago

    TOR as it exists now is a honeypot simple as. Same as that documentary called "Benedict Cumberbniamnatch's Great Work" where they cracked the radio signals of the Frenchmen but they had to let the submarine sink so that they knew that the other guy doesn't know that they knew. NSA uses ROT which is TOR-inspired but takes the techniques and incognito aspects 7 or 8 steps ahead.

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    • Imustaskforhelp a day ago

      What? Tor is a honeypot? I don't think so. What do you instead expect me to use instead of tor?

      Reply View 1 reply
    • widforss 21 hours ago

      You do know Hitler was the German Reichskanzler, not French?

      Reply View 1 reply
      • hnbad 19 hours ago

        I'm assuming the "documentary" was the movie The Imitation Game staring Benedict Cumberbatch. If that's an intentional mistake, I'd guess by "French" they meant Austrian (as Hitler was born in Austria).

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  • alphan0n a day ago

    This entirely ignores the fact that traffic to and from onion sites never leaves the Tor network, never utilizes an exit node. It doesn’t matter if a bad actor has control of every exit node if your communications are within the network unless the underlying encryption protocols have been compromised.

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    • dunghill 17 hours ago

      But not all traffic goes to onion sites.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • alphan0n 4 hours ago

        Right, you shouldn't expect traffic that goes outside the onion network to be secure and anonymous. That's the entire point of onion sites.

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  • [removed] a day ago
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  • ClumsyPilot a day ago

    > petty criminals to get away with their crimes

    Like human rights activists, journalists and dissidents in totalitarian countries.

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panarky a day ago

> what is the probability that someone randomly chooses three nodes that you own. The answer is less than 0.14%.

You calculated the probability that a specific person randomly chooses three nodes of the 1,000.

But that's not the scenario you're responding to.

>> I can't target a specific person, but eventually I can find someone who has all three bounces through tor nodes I control

Tor estimates that 2.5 million people use the network per day.

Let's assume that in a month, 10 million people use it.

Let's also assume that 80% of monthly users are not committing crimes, while the 20% who are criminals make an average of four Tor connections per month.

With those assumptions we could expect a malicious operator who controls 1,000 nodes could capture the sessions of 10,940 criminals in a given month.

Spending less than fifty cents per suspect is less than trivial.

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  • ClumsyPilot a day ago

    > could capture the sessions of 10,940 criminals in a given month

    Let’s say to do that, and now you have found 10k people accessing pirate bay in countries where it is blocked.

    Also you captured someone who lives in Siberia and watches illegal porn, now what?

    Many of these will not be actionable, like not criminals you would have interest in.

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    • panarky a day ago

      An autocratic regime of a large nation locks up its critics and other undesirables in camps.

      100,000 activists who haven't been caught yet switch to Tor for anonymity.

      For $60,000, the regime monitors Tor for a year, identifies 6,500 activists, and marches them off to the camps.

      And by discrediting Tor the regime pushes the other 93,500 activists even farther underground, constraining their ability to recruit, limiting their ability to coordinate with each other, and reducing what they can publish about what's happening to their country.

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      • hkt a day ago

        > reducing what they can publish about what's happening to their country.

        To what audience? It isn't quite what you're getting at in your post but this is worth saying: graffiti, zines, contact with journalists, radio operations like pirate radio, all of it is much more established and less uncertain in risk profile than being online. Crucially it may also be more effective.

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  • Eisenstein a day ago

    > could capture the sessions of 10,940 criminals

    What does that mean? The way I understand it you would be getting traffic correlations -- which means an IP that requested traffic from another IP and got that traffic back in a certain time period. What does that tell you, exactly, about the criminal? If you aren't looking for a specific person, how would you even know they are doing crimes?

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    • panarky a day ago

      Activists fighting an autocratic regime use a large social media site to recruit, coordinate and publish so they can reach the broadest number of people possible.

      The billionaire owner of the site supports the strongman leader and provides IP addresses for those who post wrongthink on his platform.

      Now the regime can link social media activity of anonymous activists to their real IP addresses, devices and locations.

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verbify a day ago

> Edit: For all the cynics and doomsayers here, consider this: Tor has been around for a long time, but there has never been an uptick in arrests that could be correlated to cracking the core anonymity service. If you look closely at the actual high profile cases where people got busted despite using tor, these people always made other mistakes that led authorities to them.

During WW2, the British cracked the German codes. They would create pretexts for "discovering" where German ships would be, so that the Germans wouldn't suspect that they cracked their codes.

It's impossible for us to know if the US government have cracked Tor, because the world would look identical to us whether they had or hadn't. If the only evidence they have is via Tor, and the individual is a small fry, they will prefer they get away with it rather than let people know that Tor has been cracked.

I just assume the NSA are spending their budgets on something, although maybe it is stuff like side channel attacks.

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  • avidiax a day ago

    These pretexts for "discovering" are a "bedrock principle" in law enforcement called parallel construction.

    The NSA sharing data with the DEA becomes a "routine traffic stop" that finds the drugs. The court would not allow the NSA evidence or anything found as a result, but through parallel construction, the officer lies in court that it was a "routine stop", and judicial review never occurs.

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  • chiefalchemist a day ago

    > these people always made other mistakes that led authorities to them.

    Says who? The intelligent community entity that busted them? If they're using a tool to discover X or Y they're not to let anyone know that.

    For example, I live in the NYC area. A couple of times per year there's a drug bust on the New Jersey Turnpike of a car headed to NYC. The story is always a "random" police stop ends up in a drug bust.

    Random? My arse. Of the thousands of cars on the NJTP the cops just happened to pick the one loaded with drugs? A couple times a year? I don't buy it. But what are they going to say? They have someone on the inside that tipped them off? That's not going to happen.

    The intelligence community doesn't deal in truth and facts. It deals in misinformation and that the ends justify the means. What they're doing and what they say they're doing are unlikely the same.

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    • habinero 14 hours ago

      You're ironically vastly overestimating the cops. It's not that they have good intel, it's that it's copaganda.

      They'll just make something up for publicity if they don't get something useful.

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      • chiefalchemist 7 hours ago

        Evidently, you don't know what the NJ Turnpike is like in terms of volume of traffic.

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derefr a day ago

You know what's easier than waiting around to get really lucky?

Using those same network-health dashboards as DDoS target lists, to temporarily degrade/shut down the whole network except for your own nodes.

Also, big nodes route more Tor circuits each. Costs more to run them, and they intentionally don't function as exit nodes (to avoid the "obvious" attack) — but just having a bunch of these big nodes in the network handling only middle hops, biases the rest of the network away from handling middle hops, toward handling end hops. Which means that if you then run a ton of tiny nodes...

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  • [removed] a day ago
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whimsicalism a day ago

> Could someone like the NSA with limitless resources do it? Sure

Yes, this is obviously the sort of adversary we would be discussing.

> , lets also ignore that there are different types of nodes

causing your number to be an underestimate

> The answer is less than 0.14%.

So almost certainly thousands of people

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  • sigmoid10 a day ago

    >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 when you don't target specific people and just fish randomly. But there are probably more cost effective methods as well.

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    • whimsicalism a day ago

      > 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.

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      • sigmoid10 20 hours ago

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

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PeterisP a day ago

If someone would do the thing-to-be-detected (e.g. accessing CSAM) every day, then that 0.14% probability of detection turns out to be 40% for a single year (0.9986^365) or 64% over two years, so even that would deanonymize the majority of such people over time.

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  • sigmoid10 a day ago

    That assumes you could run thousands of malicious tor nodes for several years without being detected. Unless you have vast resources and time, this is unlikely.

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    • alasdair_ a day ago

      My point is that it doesn't require "vast resources". A VPS is $5 a month. A thousand of them would be in the disposable income budget of a single FAANG engineer never mind a nation state.

      Pay people on Fiverr to set them up for you at different ISPs so that all the setup information is different. You can use crypto to pay if you want anonimity (this is actually the main reason I used to use bitcoin - I'd pay ISPs in Iceland to run TOR exit nodes for me without linking them to my identity).

      This isn't a difficult problem. A single individual with a good job could do it.

      And sure, each connection only has a very small chance of being found, but aggregate it over a year or two and you could catch half of the users of a site if they connected with a new circuit one time per day.

      I honestly can't see why a nation state or two hasn't already done this.

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      • jiveturkey a day ago

        > A VPS is $5 a month.

        With insignificant data caps. To get the data needed I believe you're looking at a couple hundred a month, to start.

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    • worldsayshi a day ago

      But it doesn't seem unfeasible for a state actor that wants to track their population then?

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      • ziddoap a day ago

        The comment that spawned this chain starts with:

        >Let's say I as a private individual

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        • worldsayshi a day ago

          Yes that's why I said 'but'. It still seems relevant to the discussion and I wasn't aware that such attack was possible.

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    • Spivak a day ago

      But given the attack is just logging the cleartext at the ends how are you going to detect that the servers are malicious?

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    • AndyMcConachie a day ago

      What detection? A malicious node is only different from a non-malicious node because all the traffic is being logged. If that's our definition of a malicious node in this case then there is no way to detect one.

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    • mistercheph a day ago

      I can't think of anyone with vast resources and time that would want to deanonymize cybercriminals

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      • sigmoid10 a day ago

        Top commenter specifically asked about himself.

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      • colechristensen a day ago

        Outside of 3 letter agencies which is obvious, I have known people who would do this for fun or whatever other personal motivation.

        A lot of "hacker" mentality projects involve putting a tremendous amount of effort into something with questionable utility.

        People climb mountains because they're there.

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  • bawolff a day ago

    That is why in tor it picks a specific guard node and sticks with it. To prevent this kind of attack where you change nodes until you hit a bad one.

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    • immibis 21 hours ago

      The attack Germany is thought to have actually used was to flood the network with middle nodes and wait until the victim connects to their middle node. Then, it knows the guard node's IP. Then, it went to an ISP and got logs for everyone who connected to that IP.

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      • posterboy 12 hours ago

        technicly this is the only comment in this chain that is relevant to the featured article, but it's technicly so incomplete that it's almost wrong, I can tell from having read the thread and knowing next to nothing else about how TOR works.

        They don't have plausible evidence to subpoena the guard node if a middle node only sees encrypted traffic. They would also need to control the exit nodes which communicate with the target's host or they simply control the host as a honeypot.

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oconnore a day ago

> 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?

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  • CapitalistCartr a day ago

    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.

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    • goodpoint 20 hours ago

      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

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    • adamrezich a day ago

      Those second and third points are pretty laughably paranoid-fantasy reasons to use Tor—even if one found oneself in either situation.

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      • throwme0827349 a day ago

        Respectfully, a large number of people rightfully fear for their lives, safety, and freedom due to being stalked or abused by a current or former partner. I have personally known several.

        Using victims' devices and communications in order to locate, and then harass, trap, or attack them, is commonplace for stalkers.

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      • yencabulator a day ago

        tor-browser comes with other privacy-boosting features, beyond its method of talking to the network. That might make a difference too, if someone is likely to look at your browser history etc.

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      • rockskon a day ago

        The second to last point is laughable since it's long been authorized in executive order that if the NSA stumbles upon information relating to criminal activity while searching for other stuff that they can report that info to the FBI.

        Heck - FBI is allowed to do the same damn thing with the data they're given by the NSA. Y'know, the whole "backdoor search loophole" which amounts to laundering authorities across agencies to get access to data they wouldn't otherwise be permitted to have.

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  • echoangle a day ago

    Depends on what you’re doing. The NSA isn’t going to expose themselves by tipping off law enforcement about small time drug deals. If you’re sharing CSAM or planning terrorist attacks, it might be different.

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    • stackghost a day ago

      >If you’re sharing CSAM or planning terrorist attacks, it might be different.

      They'll just employ parallel construction to avoid exposure.

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jrochkind1 14 hours ago

What you say is reasonable and I agree and hold that position.

> Tor has been around for a long time, but there has never been an uptick in arrests that could be correlated to cracking the core anonymity service.

If I were an intelligence agency that had "cracked" tor -- I'd probably make sure nobody would notice I had access, so I could keep eavesdropping. Not do anything that could expose my access.

It certainly could be happening. Nothing is 100%. Nothing. Just a fact. Tor is probably pretty good at what it does.

(and keep in mind, for what we're talking about in this kind of attack, all I get access to is network contacts, not the actual messages, right?)

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Eduard a day ago

> If you look closely at the actual high profile cases where people got busted despite using tor, these people always made other mistakes that led authorities to them.

Assuming tor always was or became broken and is exploitable by law enforcement, authorities would try to maintain a false believe of tor's integrity so as to crack high profile cases for as long as possible.

Within this scenario, it is plausible to assume that authorities can decipher and discover information that can be used as the official pretextual charge / minor reason ("they made the mistake to use their public email address on the dark net forum") in order to not spill the beans on the actual means (here, tor being broken).

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mzs a day ago

So if there are greater than only 357 people on topics the GP is interested in that's better than 50/50 odds.

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itake a day ago

1/ if a user sends 10,000 requests, you're saying 14 of them might see 3 compromised nodes?

2/ Police can use parallel construction. Although, given enough time (in theory) parallel construction is eventually exposed.

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  • avidiax a day ago

    > given enough time (in theory) parallel construction is eventually exposed.

    Parallel construction has existed for decades. It's even in "The Wire". It has never been tested in court, probably because it is nearly impossible to discover outside of being the agents that implement it.

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    • itake a day ago

      The police used self-powered GPS devices[1] to track criminals. These devices are used in various situations, such as when someone violates parole. The police don’t need to report the violation immediately. Instead, they wait for the person to re-enter their jurisdiction, then catch and arrest them.

      Parallel construction wasn't tested, but the means of them catching criminals this way was tested in court.

      [0] - https://www.gps.gov/news/2012/01/supremecourt/

      [1] - if the device got power from the vehicle, it would be considered "break and entering" and thus would require a warrant.

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  • yencabulator a day ago

    1/ tor-browser by default sticks to the same circuit for one origin for the session, so that'd have to be 10,000 separate sites or 10,000 separate sessions.

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moss2 20 hours ago

I think the FBI/CIA/NSA could afford 8000 nodes if they wanted to.

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dumbo-octopus a day ago

You don’t need all the middle nodes. Just the entry and exit, and enough data to do packet timing analysis to correlate them. It’s in fact shockingly easy for a well provisioned actor to trace tor traffic, and this is something the TOR project openly admits.

They’re financed by the US Government after all…

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  • alphan0n a day ago

    Onion sites do not utilize an exit node.

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    • dumbo-octopus a day ago

      There is a node that delivers your packet to the target server, is there not?

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      • alphan0n a day ago

        If the server is on the Tor network, an onion server, then it is encrypted end to end and no traffic or identity is exposed to either the onion server or any intermediary.

        That is to say, if I started an onion server on one side of the world, then connected to it from somewhere else, my connection to it would be anonymous and encrypted to any external entity.

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  • basedrum a day ago

    Tor does have padding defenses to protect against that.

    Also, according to their latest blog post on their finances, while it is true they have money from the US Government, that was only ~50% of their income (I think that was 2023). For the FUD part of that comment, see the "U.S. Government Support" section of https://blog.torproject.org/transparency-openness-and-our-20...

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    • dumbo-octopus a day ago

      “Only half” is hilarious. Thanks for that.

      And if you trust the NSA can’t overcome correlation in the presence of “padding defenses”, then sure: TOR is secure.

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      • 867-5309 18 hours ago

        I wonder how many tor users actually know this. tor would probably not exist in the same capacity without that funding

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alasdair_ a day ago

>Edit: For all the cynics and doomsayers here, consider this: Tor has been around for a long time, but there has never been an uptick in arrests that could be correlated to cracking the core anonymity service. If you look closely at the actual high profile cases where people got busted despite using tor, these people always made other mistakes that led authorities to them.

Yeah, the stated reason is always something else. But this just reminds me of "parallel construction" - what if they were found in on way and then (to hide the source) the claim was that they were found in another way?

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halfcat a day ago

> there has never been an uptick in arrests

If it was effective, would there have been a down tick in arrests at some point?

Or if the arrest rate stayed the same, would that suggest it never “worked” to begin with?

It’s like the movie trope of the detective who finds out the truth via some questionable means which isn’t admissible in court. When you know the truth you can push harder and call every bluff until you get admissible evidence.

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  • AstralStorm a day ago

    Or you can use more... underhanded means that never result in an arrest.

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alasdair_ a day ago

>The answer is less than 0.14%.

Is this per circuit? So if someone switches circuits every X hours, the chance of being caught after a year is actually quite high?

And even catching 0.14% of pedophiles would probably be worth it to the FBI or whatever, nevermind Iran catching dissidents or whatever.

My point is that is seems very cheap to do this (I as a random staff engineer could do it myself) and catch some people. A nation state could easily catch a much higher percentage if they increased the number of logging nodes slowly and carefully and deliberately did things like use many isps and update the servers gradually etc.

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  • whimsicalism a day ago

    The happy equilibrium is that if you have enough adversary nation-state intelligence services doing this and not sharing information, they'll cancel each other out and provide free node hosting.

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  • qwery a day ago

    You're misusing probability and ignoring critical information.

    There's 1000 red marbles added to a jar with 8000 blue marbles (9000 total). Take three marbles from the jar randomly, one at a time. The odds of getting three red marbles is ~0.14%. That's all.

    Tor nodes are not randomly picked marbles. The Tor network is not a jar.

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    • whimsicalism a day ago

      they’re using probability correctly. if you have a critique state it clearly

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