[tor-talk] Question for those who say "Tor is pwned"

[juan]

On Mon, 20 Jun 2016 21:25:53 -0400
Paul Syverson <paul.syverson at nrl.navy.mil> wrote:


> 
> I know I'm feeding the troll, but this is just crap. I invented onion
> routing 

	You mean, you invented the name? Or are you claiming you
	were the very first who came up with the idea of nesting
	encrypted packets, tunnels, what?

	A look at the archives of the cypherpunks mailing list, years
	94, 95 shows that term "onion" was being used to describe
	systems in which remailers used nested, encrypted 'envelopes'...



> (with David and Michael) and designed Tor (with Roger and
> Nick).  We did not design it so that an adversary can just watch the
> edges. 

	But the adversary can do that, and that's the end of your
	'anonimity' network.

	You even were honest enough to publish a paper admiting what
	kind of failure your network is...


> We designed it to separate identification from routing. Nobody
> told or requested us to make anything weak or less secure. 

	Yeah. Quoting :

	“Our motivation here is **not to provide anonymous
	communication***, but to separate identification from routing.”


	Also, tell me, how many 'national security leters' did you
	receive lately?  Oh wait, since you are a subject of the US
	government we can never know when you are lying and when you
	are telling the truth. Too bad isn't it. You, such a great
	champion of 'freedom', having your 'credibility' taken away by
	your own free and democratic government...


> The three
> of us came up with the motivations and idea for onion routing
> ourselves and argued for the usefulness of pursuing it further. And
> we designed it to be as secure as we could and still functional. And,
> as many have argued, usability and performance are security
> properties for traffic and routing security systems. Indeed perceived
> usability and performance are important, as are network and operator
> incentives. David, Michael and I designed the thing to be secure. We
> also explained that it needed to carry traffic for others,


	Yes and the reasons for that are obvious...

	Do you publish a note in torproject.org saying 

	"you dear stupid user are cover for US gov't communications and
	so are helping them commit all the crimes they commit"? 

	

> let others
> run part of the infrastructure, and be open source for it to provide
> security to any distinct enterprise or general class wanting to use it
> to protect their communications. This is part of the security design
> regardless of who builds, deploys, or uses it. There were onion
> routing networks, e.g., the Freedom network from Zero Knowledge
> Systems Inc., that, to the best of my knowledge, had nobody from the
> U.S. govt. involved in its deployment or design (other than that it
> was an instance of onion routing). It was designed and built by other
> people who are wicked smart (smarter than me) and free to create and
> build whatever they wanted.  Somehow, this is what they chose to make.


	And they went out of business a long time ago. However your
	network is alive and well...because it's subsidized by the US 
	military (like yourself)

	Do you want a basic lesson in political economy and the nature
	of subsidies? 


> 
> Some people early on when we were first publicizing and announcing
> onion routing (e.g. I remember getting such a question at FC'97) asked
> us why we weren't building pipenet. Such a network is theoretically
> way more secure for some properties in idealized environments, but
> even a single user can shut down the network by simply not sending.
> That's not secure.  In fact the first onion routing design in 95-96
> was not subject to ready observation at the edges.  

	
	That might have been the case because at that time the US gov't
	wasn't yet bothering with achieving 'total information
	awareness'... 


> (although somebody
> watching all the links from every onion router to every other could
> still learn much).  The default configuration assumed onion routers
> running on enclave firewalls with no separate clients. We explored
> various padding and similar schemes to complicate observation of
> traffic patterns, but I have yet to this day to see one that is
> adequately practical to deploy and effective. These were things to
> try to add to make the basic design more secure, but we could not
> find anything to appreciably help here so did not incorporate it into
> the Tor design.
> 
> If you ever find such a design, describe it. 
> No credible researcher in
> any scientific venue has ever claimed to have a system to be more
> secure that essentially covers the general use case and userbase of
> Tor.  

> Mix systems, DC nets, buses, PIR, etc. are all very cool. And
> subject to some strong environment and other assumptions can be more
> secure than Tor against some classes of adversaries.  


	So...?


> I have worked on
> and designed some of these cool systems myself. But compared to Tor,
> each one of these has limitations that, as explored and designed so
> far, would restrict to a small (hence more easily targeted) anonymity
> set, or has untenable usability or performance problems, or generally
> all of the above.  It's funny that there's supposed to be this
> intentional built in design weakness, and yet no scientist, engineer,
> or mathematician in any country seems to have published a stronger
> fundamental design. Hmm, perhaps you mean to imply that we who created
> onion routing not only intentionally designed our systems to be weaker
> than we could have 


	I didn't say that. What I say is that you know the design is
	limited and flawed and yet you promote it. Saying that there
	isn't  anything better is not a valid excuse.

	Furthermore, tor may be 'optimal' given certain assumptions or
	objectives, but that doesn't mean it is the only solution for
	all kind of users.

	Your 'hidden' services seem to especially lame. But of course
	you can claim that millions of joe sixpacks can 'anonymously'
	read their favorite online sports newspaper...

	
	Have padding, mixing and using fill-traffic all ruled out, why? 


	
> but that we also have controlled all of the
> scientific research and publication on secure system design by every
> researcher in every country everywhere on the planet for the last
> twenty years.


	Ah yes, I wear a tin hat. 


> 
> Onion routing design has evolved. Tor has forward secrecy, which the
> two main onion routing designs we introduced before it did not. (Nor
> did the Freedom network.) But we did not come up with including
> forward secrecy, that was first introduced in Zack Brown's
> Cebolla. And we adopted it when we designed Tor. Tor added a directory
> system after its first design, then evolved and improved design,
> robustness, and trust diffusion of the directory system over time. Tor
> added deterministic builds to further reduce the trust in Tor-built
> binaries, and work to improve continues through this day.
> 
> We have been completely forthcoming about our designs and any
> limitations found by ourselves or others, including everything we can
> empirically discern about end-to-end correlation risks from ASes,
> IXPs, MLATs, etc.  And we have always designed to be as secure as we
> practically could. I'm not going to engage further. 


	You didn't 'engage' anything, you just copy-pasted your
	standard marketing speech.


> I do invite those
> who might so engage to find any valid technical, empirically justified
> stronger design that does not make significant compromises to
> performance, cut off large chunks of the existing userbase, etc. I'm
> dubious you will find any. But if you do, I'd be happy to pursue its
> development.
> 
> aloha,
> Paul
> 
> [snip]