
Users Get Routed: Trafﬁc Correlation on Tor by Realistic Adversaries [pdf] - tcoppi
http://www.ohmygodel.com/publications/usersrouted-ccs13.pdf
======
peterwwillis
Fun related paper: Locating Hidden Servers [[http://www.onion-
router.net/Publications/locating-hidden-ser...](http://www.onion-
router.net/Publications/locating-hidden-servers.pdf)] Summary:

 _" Using random selection of backup and layering entry guard nodes will be an
improvement, but as in all Tor circuits, someone connecting through ran- dom
nodes will always be compromised if an at- tacker owns just two nodes [25].
Using the backup and layering techniques in combination with a non- random
selection, e.g. based on some kind of trust, or experience, with the nodes,
may slow the attack even more or may even prevent it entirely"_

TIL: The Office of Naval Research has been working on onion routing for 18
years. [http://www.onion-router.net/History.html](http://www.onion-
router.net/History.html)

~~~
funkaster
Yup, it is kind of prevented now (otherwise the Silk Road would've been shut
down long ago). From the paper's conclusion:

 _" Our results show that Tor’s location-hidden servers are not really
hidden—or rather they were not really hidden prior to the recent introduction
of guard nodes as countermeasures to our attacks."_

More info: [https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-
services.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en)
(where they reference the same paper)

------
seandhi
We always knew that correlation attacks by an adversary that controlled a
sufficiently large portion of the Internet were trivial to carry out. Now that
we've learned that the NSA is capturing 75% of Internet traffic then we should
assume that they are able to carry out correlation attacks fairly trivially,
right?

~~~
kylemaxwell
Yes, but I have observed multiple times that many engineers, including crypto
and even infosec folks, don't really understand or even think about traffic
analysis as a threat vector. I want to chalk this up to a lack of thinking
about systems (in the classic sense, not in the jargon for "computer" sense),
but I'm not entirely sure.

~~~
blake8086
Yes, from a T/A perspective, basically everything everyone uses leaks like a
sieve.

A great paper about T/A: [http://cryptome.org/2013/07/nsa-traffic-
analysis.pdf](http://cryptome.org/2013/07/nsa-traffic-analysis.pdf)

------
ebbv
Call me paranoid but I've always assumed Tor was a honeypot.

~~~
badman_ting
This strikes me as a meaningless statement. But if you don't want to use it,
hey, different strokes.

~~~
ebbv
Since the meaning apparently eluded you let me spell it out;

Tor seems like the perfect honeypot for government agencies looking to lure
people who are involved in illegal activities online (child porn, drug
trafficking, stolen credit cards, black hat hacking, etc.) Its origin is also
well known to be based in government research. The source/identities/ownership
of the various Tor nodes is by design unclear as being "safe".

In other words, if I were working for the NSA or FBI or whatever and designing
a honeypot to lure in as much illegal activity online under a guise of safety
and security but enable me to fully track it, I would design something like
Tor.

------
HPLovecraft
IIRC, Tor was built by the US Naval Research Labs, so... yeah one should
assume its compromised.

~~~
betterunix
The Internet was originally funded by DARPA. Must be a trap!

Tor is not controlled by the US government. Moreover, Tor was originally
created to protect US government spies in foreign countries; a deliberate
compromise would have done far more harm to government interests than good.

~~~
Create
Moglen at Re:Publica: Freedom of thought requires free media

On the other side was the then deputy attorney general of the United States
and a lawyer in private practice named Stewart Baker who had been chief
council to the National Security Agency our listeners and who was then in
private life helping businesses to deal with the listeners. He then became
later on the deputy for policy planning in the Department of Homeland Security
in the United States and has much to do with what happened in our network
after 2001

and anyway the four of us spent two pleasant hours debating the right to
encrypt and at the end their was a little diner party at the Harvard faculty
club and at the end after all the food had been taken away and the pork and
the walnut were left on the table Stuart said,

"All right, among us now we that we are all in private just us girls all let
our hair down" he didn’t had much hair even then but he let it down "We are
not going to prosecute your client Mr Zimmermann he said public key encryption
will become available we fought a long loosing battle against it but it was
just a delaying tactic" and then he looked around the room and he said "But
nobody cares about anonymity do they?"

And a cold chilled went up my spine and I thought alright Stuart and now I
know you’re going to spent the next twenty years trying to eliminate anonymity
in human society and I am going to try to stop you and let’s see how it goes.

And it’s going badly.

We didn’t built the net with anonymity built in. That was a mistake now we are
paying for it.

Our network assumes that you can be tracked everywhere.

And we have taken the Web, and we made facebook out of it.

We put one man in the middle of everything.

[http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-
of-t...](http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-thought-
requires-free-media)

~~~
HPLovecraft
thank you for that very interesting link!

