[tor-talk] Tor and HTTPS graphic

[Martin Hubbard]

Mike Perry wrote on 03/12/12 01:57 PM:

> Thus spake coderman (coderman at gmail.com):
> 
> > a lot of infrastructure to build; call it Tor 2.0:
> >
> > combine LEDBAT edge management[0] with SCTP multi-homed[1]
> > endpoints over ORCHID overlay[2] provided by IPsec telescopes[3]
> > with reliable multicast gradients[4] and stochastic fair queuing[5]
> > and you've got something resistant to passive and active attacks,
> > including traffic confirmation.
> 
> Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Same here :)

> Can you describe in a bit more detail (perhaps in a new thread)
> how stitching together a Frankenstein's creation from this
> collection of protocols would work, and how it would be deployed?

To the extent that I understand, coderman seems to be proposing the
layer-3 approach from Kiraly et al. (2008) with multi-homed endpoints
and various traffic control mechanisms. That does seem interesting.

Perhaps someone could comment about Tor's current development plans
(or point me to documents)? Maybe I should just look ;)

> And what about the edge vulnerability to these same tagging and/or
> timing attacks? Data's gotta get into this mess somehow, and come
> out again, right?

This is the issue that's been nagging me. The utility of Tor (or
coderman's vision, or even VPNs) is limited when access can be
detected and blocked. Could something like Tor operate through
covert channels (1,2)? Although only ~0.1% of total bandwidth would be
usable, that might be enough with widespread streaming HD video.

References

1) Murdoch and Lewis (2005) Embedding Covert Channels into TCP/IP
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/ih05coverttcp.pdf

2) Sellke et al. (2009) TCP/IP Timing Channels: Theory to Implementation
http://www.stat.purdue.edu/~ssellke/publications/covertTC.pdf

<coderman's references snipped>