[tor-talk] noise traffic generator?

[Jacki M]

TorProject has added some traffic padding in Tor 0.3.1.7 <https://blog.torproject.org/tor-0317-now-released>
And they are working on Adaptive traffic padding 254-padding-negotiation <https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/254-padding-negotiation.txt>.

> On Oct 6, 2017, at 12:12 PM, Seth David Schoen <schoen at eff.org> wrote:
> 
> Matej Kovacic writes:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> there is some interesting project called Noiszy: https://noiszy.com/
>> 
>> It generates fake traffic. It is more "artists" project that real
>> countermeasure, but I am thinking to implement something like this on my
>> network with several machines inside.
>> 
>> However, the main problem is that Noiszy works too random, and is not
>> "walking" in websites enough time and enough consistent to give an
>> impression someone is really browsing something.
> 
> There have been a few projects in this space before, like Helen
> Nissenbaum's TrackMeNot, and at least two others that I'm not thinking
> of right away.
> 
> I agree with your concern that it's currently too easy for an adversary
> to use statistics to learn if traffic is human activity or synthesized.
> Another problem is that the sites that the traffic generator interacts
> with might themselves get suspicious and start responding with CAPTCHAs
> or something -- which would then also reduce the plausibility of the
> traffic.
> 
> I also wonder if someone has studied higher-order statistics of online
> activity, in the sense that engaging in one activity affects your
> likelihood of engaging in another activity afterward (or concurrently).
> For example, you might receive an e-mail or instant message asking you
> to look at something on another site, and you might actually do that.
> On the other hand, some sites are more distracting and less conducive
> to multitasking than others.  For example, you probably wouldn't be
> playing a real-time online game while composing an e-mail... but you
> might play a turn-based game.
> 
> There are also kind of complicated probability distributions about events
> that retain attention.  For instance, if you're doing something that
> involves low-latency interactions with other people, it's only plausible
> that you're actually doing that if the other people were also available
> and interacting with you.  The probability that a given person continues
> communicating with you declines over time, and is also related to time
> zone and time of day.  But there's also a probability that someone else
> starts interacting with you.
> 
> Some of these things will probably have to be studied in some depth in
> order to have a hope of fooling really sophisticated adversaries with
> synthesized online activity.
> 
> -- 
> Seth Schoen  <schoen at eff.org>
> Senior Staff Technologist                       https://www.eff.org/
> Electronic Frontier Foundation                  https://www.eff.org/join
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