[tor-dev] Projects to combat/defeat data correlation

[Andreas Krey]

On Wed, 15 Jan 2014 21:16:20 +0000, Jim Rucker wrote:
> There was a story in the news recently of a Harvard student who used Tor to
> send a bomb threat to Harvard in order to cancel classes so he wouldn't
> have to take a test. He was apprehended within a day, which puts into
> question the anonymity of Tor.

This was because it was known that the threat was delivered via tor, and
that he was the only one in $(organizational unit of harvard) using tor
at that time, and he confessed when being confronted with that. There
was nothing that actually proved that he did the threat. (Unless this
is a case of parallel construction, of course, which I don't assume.)

...
> Are there any projects in Tor being worked in to combat data correlation?
> For instance, relays the send/recv constant data rates continuously -
> capping data rates and padding partial or non-packets with random data to
> maintain the data rates

At the moment that would be prohibitively expensive. Also, it wouldn't
guard against the scenario above - you can't be online and shoveling
data all the time, so longterm correlation is still possible.

Andreas

-- 
"Totally trivial. Famous last words."
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@*.org>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:29:21 -0800