[tor-talk] on the topic of tor's weaknesses

[Paul Syverson]

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 04:17:16PM -0500, grarpamp wrote:
> 
> And Msr. Syverson seems to indicate that it can be.
> 

Some abbreviation I'm not familiar with for Monsignor? I'm
pretty sure I've not been called to the RC priesthood, or for
that matter the RC church in general. I prefer Sagamore or
Trismegistus if you wish to give me an honorific.

> Yes, the weakness seems clearer now. Unless there's a way to modify
> the system so that the EG does not know it's an EG for a given
> client stream to its left, it would just be a foregone fact of life
> as part of the unsolved timing/etc attack class.
> 

There's nothing currently available to do this. Nor am I enthusiastic
about the prospect of anything that doesn't break some essential
aspect of Tor working. (I don't mean implementation. I mean it will
fail on an abstract protocol level even before that.) At best you
might reduce this from virtual certainty to a very serviceable stochastic
attack.
But that's a good thing, because otherwise Tor would be more vulnerable
to long path attacks.

aloha,
Paul