---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Mar 18:
Tor does not provide reliable anonymity!From: iamback
Date: Wed, March 18, 2015 11:12 am
To: "Armstrong Economics" <
armstrongeconomics@gmail.com>
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As far as I know Tor never got compromised given the guy hosting the hidden service didn't do anything stupid, ... , if u run Tor with no javascript etc in a safe OS and dont reveal private information you are safe imo.
Tor is not reliably anonymous! If you are trusting Tor to protect your anonymity, the NSA has probably already de-anonymized you and is saving all the incriminating information for G20 tax hunts coming over the years.
Sadly even Tor's developers admit Tor has egregious problems and they are not sure exactly what happened in every case:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-need-some-lovehttps://blog.torproject.org/blog/thoughts-and-concerns-about-operation-onymousHow did they locate the hidden services?
So we are left asking "How did they locate the hidden services?". We don't know.
...
Unfortunately, the authorities did not specify how they managed to locate the hidden services. Here are some plausible scenarios:
Bitcoin deanonymization
Ivan Pustogarov et al. have recently been conducting interesting research on Bitcoin anonymity.
Apparently, there are ways to link transactions and deanonymize Bitcoin clients even if they use Tor. Maybe the seized hidden services were running Bitcoin clients themselves and were victims of similar attacks.
Attacks on the Tor network
The number of takedowns and the fact that Tor relays were seized could also mean that the Tor network was attacked to reveal the location of those hidden services. We received some interesting information from an operator of a now-seized hidden service which may indicate this, as well. Over the past few years, researchers have discovered various attacks on the Tor network. We've implemented some defenses against these attacks, but these defenses do not solve all known issues and there may even be attacks unknown to us.
Another possible Tor attack vector could be the Guard Discovery attack. This attack doesn't reveal the identity of the hidden service, but allows an attacker to discover the guard node of a specific hidden service. The guard node is the only node in the whole network that knows the actual IP address of the hidden service. Hence, if the attacker then manages to compromise the guard node or somehow obtain access to it, she can launch a traffic confirmation attack to learn the identity of the hidden service. We've been discussing various solutions to the guard discovery attack for the past many months but it's not an easy problem to fix properly. Help and feedback on the proposed designs is appreciated.
*Similarly, there exists the attack where the hidden service selects the attacker's relay as its guard node. This may happen randomly or this could occur if the hidden service selects another relay as its guard and the attacker renders that node unusable, by a denial of service attack or similar. The hidden service will then be forced to select a new guard. Eventually, the hidden service will select the attacker.
Furthermore, denial of service attacks on relays or clients in the Tor network can often be leveraged into full de-anonymization attacks. These techniques go back many years, in research such as "From a Trickle to a Flood", "Denial of Service or Denial of Security?", "Why I'm not an Entropist", and even the more recent Bitcoin attacks above. In the Hidden Service protocol there are more vectors for DoS attacks, such as the set of HSDirs and the Introduction Points of a Hidden Service.
Advice to concerned hidden service operators
As you can see, we still don't know what happened, and it's hard to give concrete suggestions blindly.
Final words
The task of hiding the location of low-latency web services is a very hard problem and we still don't know how to do it correctly. It seems that there are various issues that none of the current anonymous publishing designs have really solved.
In a way, it's even surprising that hidden services have survived so far.
Essentially all anonymous networks suffer three fundamental design problems which make them very easy for the NSA to de-anonymize:
1) Sybil attacks (the Guard Discovery attack is aided by this). All the anonymous networks don't pay the relay nodes, so economically the NSA can be a vast majority of those nodes. In other words, I don't think a free network can be anonymous!
2) Denial of service attacks. Again I think the only robust solution to this is to make sending network packets not free.
3) Low latency relaying. Thus de-anonymization is possible with timing attacks. Thus we must design a high-latency anonymity network.
4) Tor adds exit nodes interfacing to HTTPS which make correlation attacks so much more trivial due to all the side-effects on web sites! (even if you are not using an exit node, this reduces the anonymity set overall)