[tor-talk] Netflow analysis breaks Tor

[Mirimir]

On 11/14/2014 05:42 PM, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 06:20:16PM -0500, grarpamp wrote:
>> Professor Sambuddho Chakravarty, a former researcher at Columbia
>> University???s Network Security Lab and now researching Network
>> Anonymity and Privacy at the Indraprastha Institute of Information
>> Technology in Delhi, has co-published a series of papers over the last
>> six years outlining the attack vector, and claims a 100% ???decloaking???
>> success rate under laboratory conditions, and 81.4% in the actual
>> wilds of the Tor network.
>>
>> http://thestack.com/chakravarty-tor-traffic-analysis-141114
>> https://mice.cs.columbia.edu/getTechreport.php?techreportID=1545&format=pdf
> 
> I put up a few pointers here for readers to get up to speed:
> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/traffic-correlation-using-netflows

I also recommend his PhD thesis:

Sambuddho Chakravarty (2014) Traffic Analysis Attacks and Defenses in
Low Latency Anonymous Communication
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~angelos/Papers/theses/sambuddho_thesis.pdf

> There sure are a lot of things going on in Tor-land these days, but I
> don't think this has much to do with any of the other recent stories.
> Rather, some journalist thought this would be a great time to drop
> another story.
> 
> In summary, it's great to see more research on traffic confirmation
> attacks, but a) traffic confirmation attacks are not a new area so don't
> freak out without actually reading the papers, and b) this particular one,
> while kind of neat, doesn't supercede all the previous papers.
> 
> --Roger
>