[tor-talk] Illegal Activity As A Metric of Tor Security and Anonymity

[Mark McCarron]

Juan,

Traffic analysis depends on visibility.  Tor attempts to obfuscate the source of a connection by proxying packets through a network, or chain, of systems.  If an attacker has visibility of the entire process, or even just two ends of that communication, then a range of information can be inferred.

To make an inference requires relating two or more distinct pieces of information (data points).  To undermine traffic analysis (counter-traffic analysis), or any form of analysis, we must first reduce the number of available pieces of information to just one (a single data point).

Hosting sites internally within Tor does exactly that, when it comes to a correlation attack.  The government has only one piece of the puzzle, that your machine sent a packet.  They need a second piece (i.e. where that packet went) in order to infer that you were looking at a particular hidden service.  Then they need additional information of what that site was in order to infer what you were looking at.  So, what we can see here is that for each inference we require an additional piece of information (data point).

Thus, if you want to understand the level of potential exposure of any software, be it Tor or Freenet (etc), then quantify the information (data points) available and what inferences can be made from them.  

Then annoy the hell out of the developers until they eliminate each data point.

Regards,

Mark McCarron

> Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2014 16:18:40 -0300
> From: juan.g71 at gmail.com
> To: tor-talk at lists.torproject.org
> Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Illegal Activity As A Metric of Tor Security and Anonymity
> 
> On Tue, 1 Jul 2014 18:32:27 +0100
> Mark McCarron <mark.mccarron at live.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> > Alex,
> > 
> > You must be living in a fantasy land.  The problem still remains, Tor
> > is vulnerable to a global view and that global view exists according
> > to Snowden.  Further, it would appear that Tor was designed to fit
> > into that global view and provide US intelligence with the locations
> > of both users and hidden services, whilst pretending to provide
> > anonymity.
> > 
> > I don't see anyone denying it.  Do you?
> 
> 	Well, Roger Dingledine  said 
> 
> 	¨I've tried to tolerate the conspiracy theories / trolling here,
> 	since there are legitimate worries to be had about what attacks
> 	various adversaries may have come up with,¨
> 
> 	Keywords being ¨legitimate worries¨.
> 
> 	I find it funny(entertaining) that whereas key tor people are
> 	willing to admit that the picture isnt exactly rosy, 
> 
> 	www.ohmygodel.com/publications/usersrouted-ccs13.pdf 
> 
> 	several voices in  this list seem to be pretending
> 	exactly the opposite.  And some of them candidly admit ¨ I am
> 	not a mathematician, statistician nor Tor programmer¨ (Zenaan) 
> 
> 	----------------
> 
> 	Question for the experts out there, both real and imagined. 
> 
> 	Is freenet´s distributed data storage more robust than tor´s
> 	model? (assume tor is being used only as storage)
> 
> 	Or is freenet just as susceptible to traffic analysis as tor
> 	is? 
> 
> 	
> 
> J
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 	
> 	
> 
> 
> 	
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 	
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > 
> > Its been 6 days already.
> > 
> > Regards,
> > 
> > Mark McCarron
> > 
> > > From: fuerschpiu at gmail.com
> > > Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2014 18:39:13 +0200
> > > To: tor-talk at lists.torproject.org
> > > Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Illegal Activity As A Metric of Tor
> > > Security and	Anonymity
> > > 
> > > Please Mccarron, 
> > > 
> > > The discussion is dead. You killed it yourself by not adding
> > > anything meaningful as far as I have seen. You just repeat yourself
> > > again and again as if it's a mantra. You got statistics to back up
> > > your claims? Good - show them! You got the script you used to track
> > > the onions? Awesome! Show it so we can see for ourselves and use it
> > > too! 
> > > 
> > > As others pointed out already: give us something to work with, else
> > > you can just pack up and troll another list as far as I am
> > > concerned. 
> > > 
> > > -- 
> > > tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk at lists.torproject.org
> > > To unsubscribe or change other settings go to
> > > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
> >  		 	   		  
> 
> -- 
> tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk at lists.torproject.org
> To unsubscribe or change other settings go to
> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk