---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Martin Armstrong is a cryptography neophyte
From: AnonyMint
Date: Sun, July 6, 2014 8:48 pm
To: "Armstrong Economics" <
armstrongeconomics@gmail.com>
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Sorry I wanted to end my communications, but this MUST be corrected.
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/07/06/secure-web-browsers/A number of emails have asked me about Tor. The Tor anonymity network is championed as a tool for freedom of speech and anonymity when surfing the web. The Tor network is an online service that allows users to surf the web anonymously. Its main benefit is to reduce the chances of network surveillance discovering a users location or web usage. For that reason it is championed as an important tool for promoting free speech and protecting personal privacy, especially for people under authoritarian regimes including the USA.
Alex Biryukov, Ivan Pustogarov at the University of Luxembourg discovered a flaw that allowed people to crack in. However, before the flaw became public it was corrected. The best is the Tor Bundle.
The new version of Firefox improves security and speed by enabling newer TLS (Transport Layer Security) standards by default... However, this is an open source and you can get add-ins for anonymous browsing such as Tor and AnonymoX is an initiative for anonymization on the internet.
AnonymoX actually provides anonymization and country faking is done by an anonymization network. It consists of many servers, in every country of your country list. These servers are provided and managed by them.
Besides the points made below, note also that AnonymoX is a for profit scheme, and thus will be easily subsumable by the NSA (one national security letter gag order will work fine):
https://www.anonymox.net/en/premiumWe need something better! Nothing that we have now is provably anonymous, except if you obtain an unregistered connection to the internet.
There are several issues. For one the mere usage of the TOR network itself, makes you into the subset of 'suspicious users'. The pool not using TOR is still larger. It's not a perfect solution. the NSA has a technique that targets outdated Firefox browsers codenamed EgotisticalGiraffe. It has several weaknesses, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28anonymity_network%29#WeaknessesUsing tor alone would not be probable cause for law enforcement to get a warrant as there are several legit reasons to use it.
The browser exploits will continue to proliferate because the NSA purchases zeroday exploits:
https://www.google.com/search?q=NSA+purchases+zeroday+exploitshttps://www.schneier.com/essay-455.htmlEmploying anonymity proxy servers lumps you together with a much smaller portion of the internet users, with a much higher percentage of them doing nefarious activities, thus the national security agencies will likely be apply extra effort to track you and or save your data permanently. My understanding is the NSA can't yet save all traffic it processes from the internet permanently, instead it runs filters on it and saves only data flagged by the filters. Using anonymity proxies (Tor, I2P, VPNs, Anonymox, server-based bitcoin mixers e.g. bitcoinfog, etc) raises a flag, as well as any encrypted data their computers can't decrypt to run the keyword filters on. The NSA can decrypted nearly all HTTPS (TLS) traffic on the internet, because the root certification companies have their signing keys backdoored.
Also the weaknesses you listed are not complete. Every low-latency Chaum mixnet (i.e. Tor, I2P, Anonymox, etc) is subject to timing attacks due to a global adversary (e.g. national security agencies) that can monitor most or all of the encrypted (even if they can't decrypt it) traffic passing in and out of the proxy servers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Onion_routing&oldid=592703635#Weaknesseshttps://tails.boum.org/doc/about/warning/index.en.html#index4h1https://tails.boum.org/doc/about/warning/index.en.html#index7h1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28anonymity_network%29#Exit_node_eavesdroppingIf you actually look in to where these Tor nodes are hosted and how big they are, some of these nodes cost thousands of dollars each month just to host because they're using lots of bandwidth, they're heavy-duty servers and so on. Who would pay for this and be anonymous?
Thus Tor et al are more likely to be honeypots some (or most?) of the time.
There is no plausible way to prove that (to know whether) any anonymity proxy servers is not compromised by a backdoor (spyware, virus, etc) on the server, or the operators have been served a national security gag order, or an individual in their company is a spy, or they are an operation funded and run by the national security agencies, etc..
Note on the more conspiratorial perspective that the black budget of those powers-that-be who pulls the strings inside the government is greater than the $3 trillion (est. $5 trillion according to Catherine Austin Fitts at solari.com) that Donald Rumsfeld announced the day before 9/11 was missing from the Pentagon budget (and all the records were conveniently destroyed by the attack on the Pentagon the next day).
The NSA can perhaps even reprogram the microcode in your hardware and perhaps even access your computer over an air gap, if they become interested enough in your activities.
http://www.eweek.com/security/nsa-can-hack-you-even-if-you-arent-connected-to-the-internet.htmlhttp://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/meet-badbios-the-mysterious-mac-and-pc-malware-that-jumps-airgaps/http://www.gizmag.com/malware-jump-air-gap/30056/https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/air_gaps.htmlhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/steveblank/2013/07/15/your-computer-may-already-be-hacked-nsa-inside/http://www.infowars.com/intel-ceo-refuses-to-answer-questions-on-whether-nsa-can-access-processors/I wrote the following about iCloak:
This is good for the other features it has, except it would be nice to have an option to turn off Tor or I2P, since both are likely to be honeypots.
The only sure way to obfuscate your IP address is to use an IP address that isn't registered to you.