Tor is getting a major security upgrade

[Batu69]

To hackers, spies, and cyber-criminals these days, calling Tor “secure” is a bit laughable. There are so many exploits and workarounds, along with unavoidable weaknesses to side-channel attacks performed in the physical world, that in some cases the false sense of cyber-security can end up making relaxed use of Tor less secure than paranoid use of the regular internet. If you’re someone looking to buy some weed on the internet (or communicate securely with your mistress), Tor is probably alright for you. If you’re looking to sell some weed on the internet, get in contact with a government informant, or share sensitive information between foreign activists, it probably isn’t. Tor is looking to change that.

This is coming specifically in the wake of recent revelations of wide-ranging vulnerabilities in Tor’s anonymity protocols. A high-profile expose accused researchers at Carnegie Mellon of accepting a government bounty (reportedly a cool million dollars) to de-anonymize certain Tor users (those specifically mentioned in the expose include a child porn suspect and a Dark Market seller). Their attack vector and others are just what cynical hacker-forum users have been prophesying for years, things like malicious Tor nodes and directory servers that exist solely to suck up the personal info of those Tor users they serve.

One major initiative involves the algorithm governing the selection and use of “guard nodes,” which are the first anonymizing nodes used by a Tor hidden service, and thus the only nodes interacting with the legitimate IP, directly. Right now, a Tor connection might use multiple guard nodes and as a result open itself up to more vulnerability than necessary — now, the developers want to make sure that Tor connections use the minimum possible number of guard nodes, and preferably just one.

Another push hopes to reinforce the wall between dark web domains, the crawlers used by search engines, and specialized server-finders. One of the strengths of a hidden service is that it’s hidden — not just the physical location of the server hosting the service, but the digital address of the service itself, unless you’re specifically handed the randomly generated onion address. Keeping hidden services off of search engine results means that a private service can remain private, used only by those people specifically handed the address. Should an attacker find that address, Tor’s anonymity protocols should protect it. But attackers can’t even try to access services they have no idea exist.

If you’re up to delving a bit deeper into the Dark Web, and you don’t mind looking at 99 useless sites for every interesting one, boot up the Tor Browser and take a look at this ingenious hidden service indexing tool for an idea of the level of crawling that can currently be done on the Deep Web.

The Tor Project exists to provide anonymity — that is its main function, and all other functions are in service to that. So, to attack the security of a Tor user (even a legitimately horrible criminal) is to attack Tor itself. It’s a tough principle to stand behind, at the end of the day — to get mad about police efforts to catch child pornographers. Yet, the security world is united; security researcher Bruce Schneider has called Carnegie Mellon’s alleged collaboration “reprehensible,” as did numerous other academic security researchers.

Their reasoning is sound. There is simply no way to attack the availability of anonymity to bad people without also undermining the availability of anonymity to good ones. We also need to have a class of disinterested researchers who can interface with the criminal/quasi-legal cyber underground and have meaningful, honest conversations — we need this for social understanding, the maintenance of free speech, and effective law enforcement.

That’s not a perspective that seems to exist in the government, to any extent. The recent terrorist attacks in Paris have led to sustained attacks on encryption and anonymity, even before the investigation produced any evidence that the attackers had used encryption, and certainly in absence of any evidence that if they had not used encryption that they would have been detected reliably by French or international security agencies. The New York Times, which broke the story of an alleged encryption aspect to the attacks, has since pulled the story from their website.

Of course, the hacker/security community will take some time to win back, and may never return to the fold. There’s a significant number of people who still believe that Tor is an elaborate government honeypot with zero real security from government spying. That’s unlikely, but ultimately it’s the perception that counts. Can the Tor Project win back the hardcores? Perhaps not. But with its continuing, aggressive updates, it could keep us normies safer as we browse drug-lists without buying, stare uncomprehendingly at ISIS statements posted in Arabic, and just generally indulge the extremes of our intellectual curiosity.

In other words, it could keep the basic tenets of liberty alive just a little bit longer.

News source

[SURbit]

Their attack vector and others are just what cynical hacker-forum users have been prophesying for years, things like malicious Tor nodes and directory servers that exist solely to suck up the personal info of those Tor users they serve.

There’s a significant number of people who still believe that Tor is an elaborate government honeypot with zero real security from government spying.

A good read Batu69, I enjoyed it.

In my quote this two sentences above seen to hold some ground as I find that Tor was initially developed by the

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

History:

The core principle of Tor, "onion routing", was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees,

mathematician Paul Syverson and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, with the purpose of protecting

U.S. intelligence communications online. Onion routing was further developed by DARPA in 1997.

In 2004, the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free licence, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

began funding Dingledine and Mathewson to continue its development.

In December 2006, Dingledine, Mathewson and five others founded The Tor Project, a Massachusetts-based 501 research-education nonprofit organization responsible for maintaining Tor.

The EFF acted as The Tor Project's fiscal sponsor in its early years, and early financial supporters of The Tor Project included the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau, Internews, Human Rights Watch, the University of Cambridge, Google, and Netherlands-based Stichting NLnet.

From this period onwards, the majority of funding sources came from the US government.

In November 2014 there was speculation in the aftermath of Operation Onymous that a Tor weakness has been exploited.

A representative of Europol was secretive about the method used, saying: "This is something we want to keep for ourselves.

The way we do this, we can’t share with the whole world, because we want to do it again and again and again" A BBC source cited a 'technical breakthrough' that allowed the tracking of the physical location of servers, and the number of sites that police initially claimed to have infiltrated led to speculation that a weakness in the Tor network had been exploited.

This possibility was downplayed by Andrew Lewman, a representative of the not-for-profit Tor project, suggesting that execution of more traditional police work was more likely.

However, in November 2015 court documents on the matter generated serious ethical security research as well as Fourth Amendment concerns.

Still with the original concept of military and government involvements and backing, leads one to think twice of it's purpose now and if any backdoors and weakness isn't a planned move from the start.

I'm only presenting the printed facts and saying "hum".

Here is an old 2006 article - if anyone is interested.

HOWTO: Anonymous communication with Tor - some hints and some pitfalls

http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/howto-anonymous-communication-with-tor-some-hints-and-some-pitfalls

Tor (The Onion Router), which was created by the United States Naval Research Laboratory with the specific goal of helping its users towards privacy and anonymity on line.

In Tor, your traffic is bounced around along an unpredicatable, changable path, getting encrypted and re-encrypted along the way so that each node in the path can tell only where the incoming packet came from, and where it should send it as its next hop.

You can use Tor without participating in the anonymising parts of the network, and you can participate in the anonymisation without being what's known as an exit node.

Exit nodes are where the final decrypted content emerges onto the internet, and therefore the place where people trying to track traffic back will first look.

http://www.nsaneforums.com/topic/247587-serious-security-understanding-the-p-in-vpn/?hl=vpns

I see this was touched on by you somewhat in another post here on the forum.

Sorry if I seem to know what I'm adding to your post here as I don't - this is relatively all new to me and only wanted to give some content for other viewers who might be as green as I in understanding all of this.

I do find you make the most interesting posts in relationship to this kind of information. Thank you.

I hope in the future if not already covered by you to include this covered and outlined better. v v v

You can use Tor without participating in the anonymising parts of the network, and you can participate in the anonymisation without being what's known as an exit node.

If done already could you give a link, please.

Another good read for other viewers -

http://www.nsaneforums.com/topic/236916-prying-eyes-inside-the-nsas-war-on-internet-security/?hl=vpns

It's from another contributing member here on the forum.