Tor seems to have a huge security risk--please prove me wrong!

[Mike Perry]

Thus spake Gregory Maxwell (gmaxwell at gmail.com):

> On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 3:54 AM, Mike Perry <mikeperry at fscked.org> wrote:
> [snip]
> > Any classifier needs enough bits to differentiate between two
> > potentially coincident events. This is also why Tor's fixed packet
> > size performs better against known fingerprinting attacks. Because
> > we've truncated the lower 8 bits off of all signatures that use size
> > as a feature in their fingerprint classifiers. They need to work to
> > find other sources of bits.
> 
> If this is so??? that people are trying to attack tor with size
> fingerprinting but failing because of the size quantization and then
> failing to publish because they got a non-result??? then it is something
> which very much needs to be made public.

According to the research groups Roger has talked to, yes, this is the
case.
 
> Not only might future versions of tor make different design decisions
> with respect to cell size, other privacy applications would benefit
> from even a no-result in this area.

The problem though is that it's hard to publish a no-result, unless
its pretty a pretty surprising no-result, or at least a quantifiable
no-result. It's not terribly surprising that existing fingerprinting
techniques do not work well "out of the box" against Tor, because a
lot less information is available during a Tor session, and there is a
lot more noise (due to more than just the 512-byte cell size).

If someone actually worked hard and took all these things into
account, and still had a result that said "Fingerprinting on Tor does
not usually work unless you have fewer than than X numbers of targets
and/or event rates below Y", it still probably would belong more in a
tech report than a full academic paper, unless it also came with
information-theoretic proofs that showed exactly why their
implementation got the results it did.


-- 
Mike Perry
Mad Computer Scientist
fscked.org evil labs
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