[tor-talk] Neal Krawetz's abcission proposal, and Tor's reputation

[Alec Muffett]

On 30 August 2017 at 10:51, Jon Tullett <jon.tullett at gmail.com> wrote:

> Blog post refers:
> http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/773-
> Tor-and-the-Perfect-Storm.html
>
> Leaving aside the accusations of bias in the first part, what is the
> view of the proposal to force hidden services to rotate addresses?
>


Simply, it's as short-sighted as any other perspective that sees Onion
networking as an anonymity tool, rather than as a better-than-mere-TCP+SSL
mechanism for providing communications privacy, integrity, availability and
assurance.


In case those terms need spelling out:

- onions provide circuit-level privacy on-par with the likes of VPNs, but
without the setup hassle.

- ditto, providing integrity at the circuit level, thereby inhibiting the
likes of (say) "sslstrip"

- availability of a service; I'm finding it interesting to consider that
the TCP/IP Internet requires the existence of companies (mentioning no
names) to provide DDoS mitigation, but sites which set up with Onion
addresses are getting comparable levels of DDoS mitigation for free*. Tor
blockproofing and (importantly) Onion DDoS-protection is pretty good.

- assurance: if you can type in the (static) Onion address, you know
immediately with whom you are communicating.


Proposals to undermine these qualities in the name of $GOAL are on-par with
Law Enforcement demands for "golden keys" to undermine the integrity of
end-to-end encrypted conversations**.

Practical example: the point of the Facebook onion site is to provide the
above-listed four benefits - plus a better quality of service - to people
who choose to access Facebook over Tor; the point is to free the
communications path from mediation of any form. To see this as a threat, or
to argue that "well maybe $THIS_SITE is okay, but $THAT_SITE should not be
afforded such protection" - is to call for censorship.

    - alec



*For a Twitter thread in this vein:
https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/899521422774722564

**For more on this thesis:
https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/tor-is-end-to-end-encryption-for-computers-to-talk-to-other-computers-34e41d81c9e2

-- 
http://dropsafe.crypticide.com/aboutalecm