0xEF 2 days ago

It was also developed by the United States Navy and has been criticized for not being as secure as it claims it is. This should come as no surprise since the US military and agencies have a history of demanding backdoors in software, which just means more attack vectors for outsiders to sniff out.

I make no claims that commercial VPNs are more secure, but at least they have some level of interest in keeping their promises if people are paying them, whereas a free service does not carry the same incentive.

Pick your poison, I guess.

  • theon144 2 days ago

    >It was also developed by the United States Navy

    Cool, sounds like an organization that is heavily incentivized to make their communication hard to intercept and eavesdrop on.

  • akimbostrawman 2 days ago

    The navy backdoor claims are unsubstantiated FUD unless you can point them out in the freely available and accessible code. Not to mention that they created the tool to also use themselves.

    They also haven't had any influence or control in the development of todays tor project that has existed for over 20 years and despite a massive amount of attacks and research there has never been found anything.

    That does not mean there aren't serious drawbacks that are more worth pointing out such as why bother with a very complex and noisy backdoor when you can just covertly create enough nodes to do traffic correlation.

    • thrwaway1985882 2 days ago

      > That does not mean there aren't serious drawbacks that are more worth pointing out such as why bother with a very complex and noisy backdoor when you can just covertly create enough nodes to do traffic correlation.

      Winner winner chicken dinner.

      FVEY's annual budget is $1.7bn + $1bn + $122mm (NZ :3) + $4.6bn + $classified billion.

      You think those guys can't mount a Sybil attack against https://metrics.torproject.org/ ?!

NitpickLawyer 2 days ago

> real untraceable anonymity and is 100% free.

And 50% of the time it works every time...

A lot of things simply don't work if you're using tor. You get blocked, you get blacklisted, accounts get terminated, and so on.

  • hmry 2 days ago

    I generally agree, but the same thing also happens to Mullvad exit nodes (though not to the same degree.) Imgur is perpetually "over capacity", breaking images across multiple websites. Twitch tells me "your browser is not supported, try Chrome or Firefox" when trying to log in on Firefox. Netflix blocks all regional content, etc. Not to mention the constant Cloudflare captchas. I once had to use Tor because Mullvad was blocked (creating a foreign Steam account)

    Google Search comes to mind as the most Tor-hostile website though, and that allows Mullvad just fine.

  • remram 2 days ago

    Run Mullvad over Tor instead of Mullvad over this Obscura thing ;-)

    • Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago

      tor generally doesn't recommend running vpn over tor makes any of your opsec any more safer , in fact I can argue that it makes your opsec worse

      but if a website is working on mullvad and not on tor and you are forced to use that website , then yes compromise your opsec a little bit I suppose

      • remram 2 days ago

        The point is not opsec but speed, under the GP's assumption that Mullvad exit nodes have better reputation than tor exit nodes. Not sure if the case, I don't use Mullvad.

        • Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago

          I was talking about tor + mullvad where you first connect to tor then mullvad instead of obscura for connecting to a website where mullvad is allowed and tor is blocked like google(google's basically useless in tor thousands of captcha and then sorry mate we can't)

          so I would argue that tor + mullvad is still a worse opsec than tor and it still has roughly the same / slightly worse speed with tor.

          but I would also argue that tor + mullvad is a better model than obscura + mullvad for opsec but not for speed.

          TLDR: Don't use tor with vpn's unless you are forced to (like website block , because then you are kind of forced to reduce your opsec a little bit)

akimbostrawman 2 days ago

There does not exist a system or method to make a signal truly 100% untraceable. What you can do and tor does is severely weakening the odds of the tracing being successful by increasing the amount of work and involved parties thereby improving the odds that the tracing never reaches the actual origin.

thefz 2 days ago

In many countries using Tor can get you in trouble.

  • gruez 2 days ago

    That's going to be the case for using Obscura as well?

immibis 2 days ago

[flagged]

  • Run_DOS_Run 2 days ago

    This comment is wrong and not funny.

    1) you didn't read path selection constraints: https://spec.torproject.org/path-spec/path-selection-constra...

    >We do not choose more than one router in a given network range, which defaults to /16 for IPv4 and /32 for IPv6. (C Tor overrides this with EnforceDistinctSubnets; Arti overrides this with ipv[46]_subnet_family_prefix.)

    2) There is currently no exit-node hosted at Hetzner. Check the Tor atlas

    • immibis 2 days ago

      1) Hetzner has more than one /16. Probably not in the same rack though. Might be adjacent rows. Organizations which have their own IP ranges can use them at Hetzner, too.

      2) Exit circuits are not the only type of circuit.

      • Run_DOS_Run 2 days ago

        >Organizations which have their own IP ranges can use them at Hetzner, too.

        If you own the nodes you can just log the encrypted traffic with metadata like user IP (if its an entry-node, which requires a Guard-flag), source and destination Tor-node and timestamp to send it to a centralized logging server. No need to host them in the same rack.

        The problem of three nodes being in one rack is traffic analysis of an external attacker, who doesn't own the nodes. If someone already owns the nodes it doesn't matter where they host them.. Using your own IP range for an attack would just be more complicated, less effective than just buying nodes worldwide and is an OPSEC risk.

        So the only reason to run tor nodes on your own IP range on Hetzner servers is if you work together with an organization which has access to ISP and datacenter traffic and probably work together with the datacenter owner to attack Tor users through a correlation attack.

        >Exit circuits are not the only type of circuit. Connections to onion services are sent over 6 nodes, not 3. You talked about 3 nodes, so I assumed you talk about the typical Guard or Bridge Node -> Mid-Node -> Exit-Node circuit. The only reason to have less nodes are single-hop onion services. They are an edge-case..

        EDIT: fixed grammer

        • immibis 2 days ago

          You're speaking as if the only reason to run Tor nodes is to attack Tor.