Attacking and Defending the Tor Network

Trailrunner7 writes "In a talk at the USENIX LEET workshop Tuesday, Nick Mathewson of the Tor Project discussed the group's recent challenges in responding to suppression efforts by governments in Egypt, China and elsewhere. What the Tor members have learned in these recent incidents is that while governments are becoming more up front about their willingness to shut off Internet access altogether or censor content, users are also becoming more resourceful. Mathewson said that the group is working on methods for alleviating the problems that national-level restrictions cause for Tor users. One method involves moving to a modular transport method in order to get around some of the throttling that ISPs perform on encrypted traffic in order to make Tor usage more difficult. In a separate talk at LEET, Stevens LeBlond of INRIA in France presented research on methods for tracing Tor users back to their IP address. One of the attacks, which LeBlond and his co-authors titled 'Bad Apple,' used an exit node that the researchers controlled in order to trace the streams of data sent by users of BitTorrent over Tor back to their IP addresses."

Re:Never 100% safe

[Anonymous Coward]

Torrent is a naturally leaky protocol, it doesn't take much effort to conceal anything about the user. It isn't even surprising that they could find it.

and the same will go for any other type of encryption, IP masking etc

Equating encryption with IP masking shows that you know nothing about what you are talking about.

I can guarantee that those carrying out the real illegal activity, such as sharing child-pr0n, will be tracked down one way or another.

I could go download 100000 CP videos over Tor\Freenet right now and never fear being discovered. Got read the news, anyone who was caught was using Limewire, tried to access a honeypot, or bought the sick shit.

All that TOR does is provides people who aren't really that switched-on with a false sense of security about their activities.

Does the Tor project, the EFF, and the Navy know that the project that they supported at one time or another have no grounding in mathematics and are just snake oil? Who to believe, some asshole on slashdot, or a peer-reviewed project.....

Re:One word

[SuricouRaven]

Massive, massive overhead. Also, only any use for private communications where both parties have already exchanged some form of key.

Re:One word

[Locke2005]

Correct on both counts. But any system that allows new people to join in without being referred by a trusted party invites participation by government infiltrators. Consider key exchange as a form of formal introduction, like a fraternity handshake.