Degrading Tor Network Performance Only Costs a Few Thousand Dollars Per Month

Threat actors or nation-states looking into degrading the performance of the Tor anonymity network can do it on the cheap, for only a few thousands US dollars per month, new academic research has revealed. An anonymous reader writes: According to researchers from Georgetown University and the US Naval Research Laboratory, threat actors can use tools as banal as public DDoS stressers (booters) to slow down Tor network download speeds or hinder access to Tor's censorship circumvention capabilities. Academics said that while an attack against the entire Tor network would require immense DDoS resources (512.73 Gbit/s) and would cost around $7.2 million per month, there are far simpler and more targeted means for degrading Tor performance for all users. In research presented this week at the USENIX security conference, the research team showed the feasibility and effects of three types of carefully targeted "bandwidth DoS [denial of service] attacks" that can wreak havoc on Tor and its users. Researchers argue that while these attacks don't shut down or clog the Tor network entirely, they can be used to dissuade or drive users away from Tor due to prolongued poor performance, which can be an effective strategy in the long run.

Re:

[LynnwoodRooster]

Free web hosting [webfreehosting.net], located via Opera and a VPN. You're welcome.

$86 million a year is kind of cheap

[LostMyAccount]

...at least at the scale of nation-states and transnational corporations, depending on what disrupting Tor means to them.

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[AHuxley]

State/city police could afford that in wealthy nations given 100 million and billion $ budgets.
Make the end user wonder what much better funded federal gov/mil/security services have been collecting on onion routing use for years?
A huge slow honeypot globally?

Threats to the status quo

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

Shows just what lengths nation states will undertake to keep power at any cost, keeping their populace blind deaf and dumb.

But keep telling yourself you live in a country where you are free...

Re:

[AHuxley]

Onion routing is slow?
Try any VPN that has to respond it its own nations police requests?

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[iggymanz]

er, theoretical studies about something that isn't happening show this? nope, shows nothing about anything.

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[jellomizer]

Shortly after 9/11 people were furious that Terrorist were communicating over secure/encrypted channels, that the government couldn't decode in time. There is a fine line between being a renegade and a revolutionary.
We need to be honest with ourselves. Freedom comes at the cost of safety. Any law or regulation meant to stop the bad guy will also stop a good guy.

If we want our Freedom to communicate without government control or censoring, then we need to expect others will do so in a harmful method.
If we

Ambiguous headline

[OneHundredAndTen]

At least, to me: when I read it first I thought it meant that an ongoing degradation of Tor network performance costs a few thousand dollars a month. To whomever manages it, I guess, which implies that they might not agree with 'only'.

How much does it cost to disrupt slashdot?

[m0gely]

I click an article to read some comments and try to swipe back to look at more on the front page and Iâ(TM)m now in some sort of captive ad portal with the usual garbage ads at the bottom of the page. Canâ(TM)t swipe back, canâ(TM)t hit the X. WTH? These ads worth it? Iâ(TM)m kind of near the end with slashdot. Itâ(TM)s starting (more than ever anyway) to run with clickbait headlines, question headlines, just plain stupid headlines: âoethe latest claim to Satoshi Nakamoto is th

Easier and cheaper way

[GameboyRMH]

Set a few seedboxes to try downloading torrents through Tor, that'll bring the whole network to a crawl, until they update the default config to block bittorrent traffic.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I have tried bittorrent over tor. It is not feasible because most torrent trackers are UDP only. You can't do UDP over tor.