Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: CHROOT on May 12, 2013, 02:43 pm
-
In 2011 Michael Reed, one of Tor's creators, joined a tor-talk discussion and answered this very question. It was later posted to Cryptome with the title, "TOR Made for US Govt Open Source Spying."
Why would any govt create something their enemies can easily use against
them, then continue funding it once they know it helps the enemy, if a govt
has absolutely no control over it?
Because it helps the government as well. An anonymity network that
only the US government uses is fairly useless. One that everyone uses
is much more useful, and if your enemies use it as well that's very
good, because then they can't cut off access without undoing their own
work.
BINGO, we have a winner! The original *QUESTION* posed that led to the
invention of Onion Routing was, "Can we build a system that allows for
bi-directional communications over the Internet where the source and
destination cannot be determined by a mid-point?" The *PURPOSE* was for
DoD / Intelligence usage (open source intelligence gathering, covering
of forward deployed assets, whatever). Not helping dissidents in
repressive countries. Not assisting criminals in covering their
electronic tracks. Not helping bit-torrent users avoid MPAA/RIAA
prosecution. Not giving a 10 year old a way to bypass an anti-porn
filter. Of course, we knew those would be other unavoidable uses for
the technology, but that was immaterial to the problem at hand we were
trying to solve (and if those uses were going to give us more cover
traffic to better hide what we wanted to use the network for, all the
better...I once told a flag officer that much to his chagrin). I should
know, I was the recipient of that question from David, and Paul was
brought into the mix a few days later after I had sketched out a basic
(flawed) design for the original Onion Routing.
The short answer to your question of "Why would the government do this?"
is because it is in the best interests of some parts of the government
to have this capability... Now enough of the conspiracy theories...
-Michael Reed
You can read it here: http://cryptome.org/0003/tor-spy.htm
-
In other words, everything else is justifiable collateral damage, from their perspective.
Paul Syverson, the other co-creator of onion routing, pops onto that list every few months to address the latest person who finds out that Tor was funded by the US military -- and goes into panic mode.
He says the same thing. A communications network that only the CIA uses is useless. Anyone chatting through the network must be a CIA agent. But if everyone uses, then it's deniable who you are. My ISP can see that I use Tor, but am I druggie, a pedo, a corporate whistle blower, an intelligence agent? They are like the entry guard. They know who I am but not what I'm doing.
-
The focus on covering intelligence assets is true about Tor when it first originated, however these days the development community currently working the most on Tor seems to be primarily interested in helping people in oppressive countries such as China.
-
So, which is it? The US government created a system for terrorist to communicate with impunity. Or :
The US government can actually monitor enough onion routers so as to render Tor the biggest honeypot ever.
-
They can monitor enough relays to pwn a few of the people some of the time.
In contrast, they can run enough i2p and and Freenet nodes to identify (though not pwn) almost all of the people, all of the time. On i2p, they could probably pwn some of the people, some of the time. On Freenet, it is unlikely they could pwn anyone, but you couldn't run a service like SR on Freenet.
And with any one hop proxy or VPN, they can pwn all of the people, all of the time.
So those are your options.
-
They can monitor enough relays to pwn a few of the people some of the time.
The thing is, since anyone can add relays to the network, then anyone can do this. China or Russia can add relays to spy on CIA agents. You either get robust private communication for everyone or no one. So the US government benefits from an anonymity network that they can't completely pwn.
-
They can monitor enough relays to pwn a few of the people some of the time.
In contrast, they can run enough i2p and and Freenet nodes to identify (though not pwn) almost all of the people, all of the time. On i2p, they could probably pwn some of the people, some of the time. On Freenet, it is unlikely they could pwn anyone, but you couldn't run a service like SR on Freenet.
And with any one hop proxy or VPN, they can pwn all of the people, all of the time.
So those are your options.
It is really hard to enumerate Freenet clients if they run in darknet mode. It is trivial to enumerate all I2P clients though. It is really hard to enumerate Tor clients because of entry guards and bridges and obfsproxy.
Freenet is really unique because it aims to provide plausible deniability in addition to anonymity. I2P has a little bit of plausible deniability from internal attackers (because essentially all clients route for each other, and there are variable length paths), but not external attackers. Tor on the other hand is focused entirely on anonymity, it has pretty much no plausible deniability at all except for *maybe* if you run as an exit node and claim that connections to the clearnet came from Tor users (and even this will not protect you from an external attacker). If an attacker watches your Tor entry guard and the destination you surf to, you are pretty much fucked. If your direct freenet peers watch an illegal file being routed to you, they still cannot easily prove that you actually requested the file, for all they know you are just routing it for somebody else like they are. If they see you insert an illegal file into the network, they don't know if you are the person who originally published the file or if you are just routing on an inserted file like they are. The plausible deniability of Freenet is what makes it so much more robust than Tor.
But like you mentioned, Freenet is very different from Tor and I2P. You don't run a normal server and anonymize it with Freenet, rather all of the nodes make some of their hard drive space available and content is hosted redundantly distributed throughout the network. This means running php forums etc on Freenet is impossible. However I do think a site like SR could operate on Freenet, it would just need to use custom client side software designed to work with Freenet. Just like there are Freenet specific software packages for forums, E-mail, etc.
-
They can monitor enough relays to pwn a few of the people some of the time.
The thing is, since anyone can add relays to the network, then anyone can do this. China or Russia can add relays to spy on CIA agents. You either get robust private communication for everyone or no one. So the US government benefits from an anonymity network that they can't completely pwn.
I think that the CIA probably uses their own nodes except for the exit. They still get cover traffic from other people using their nodes, and then they don't need to worry about China getting their entry guards.
-
It is really hard to enumerate Freenet clients if they run in darknet mode.
Yeah, darknet mode is why I said "almost all". Presumably, very few people use it besides people in oppressed countries, where connections to the other (easily identifiable) nodes are blocked.
Darknet mode is the equivalent of an entry guard, except there is no mechanism to randomly pick from a set of guards, so you get linkability between the darknet guard and the person being guarded.
It is trivial to enumerate all I2P clients though. It is really hard to enumerate Tor clients because of entry guards and bridges and obfsproxy.
Freenet is really unique because it aims to provide plausible deniability in addition to anonymity. I2P has a little bit of plausible deniability from internal attackers (because essentially all clients route for each other, and there are variable length paths), but not external attackers. Tor on the other hand is focused entirely on anonymity, it has pretty much no plausible deniability at all except for *maybe* if you run as an exit node and claim that connections to the clearnet came from Tor users (and even this will not protect you from an external attacker). If an attacker watches your Tor entry guard and the destination you surf to, you are pretty much fucked. If your direct freenet peers watch an illegal file being routed to you, they still cannot easily prove that you actually requested the file, for all they know you are just routing it for somebody else like they are. If they see you insert an illegal file into the network, they don't know if you are the person who originally published the file or if you are just routing on an inserted file like they are. The plausible deniability of Freenet is what makes it so much more robust than Tor.
I agree, it is more robust than Tor for users, with some big trade offs for publishers and service providers.
But like you mentioned, Freenet is very different from Tor and I2P. You don't run a normal server and anonymize it with Freenet, rather all of the nodes make some of their hard drive space available and content is hosted redundantly distributed throughout the network. This means running php forums etc on Freenet is impossible. However I do think a site like SR could operate on Freenet, it would just need to use custom client side software designed to work with Freenet. Just like there are Freenet specific software packages for forums, E-mail, etc.
Yeah, everything has to be moved to the client. I think it's more complicated than it looks to implement all of SR's features that way (managing bitcoins, for example), and potentially puts users at greater risk when they have to run a Java app made by an anonymous person. If the SR hidden service gets pwned and you anonymize your bitcoins and encrypt your address, there's not much LE can do to you. But if LE compromised DPR and modified his Freenet app, they could pwn everyone.
-
Yeah, darknet mode is why I said "almost all". Presumably, very few people use it besides people in oppressed countries, where connections to the other (easily identifiable) nodes are blocked.
Darknet mode is the equivalent of an entry guard, except there is no mechanism to randomly pick from a set of guards, so you get linkability between the darknet guard and the person being guarded.
I don't use Freenet but I am pretty sure a lot of users run in open net mode until they get a few peers and then switch to darknet mode using a few of those peers as their entry guards.
I agree, it is more robust than Tor for users, with some big trade offs for publishers and service providers.
It depends on what is being published. It definitely puts a lot of restrictions on service providers that Tor does not. But for somebody publishing a .pdf for example, Freenet is probably even better than Tor for the publisher. Freenet also has the advantage of being essentially immune to DDoS attacks knocking services offline. It also has the nice benefit of not requiring somebody to configure a server, or own a server, to publish content. So I would say Freenet is actually much better for publishing content than Tor is, and it has advantages for service providers and publishers in the form of resiliency, but Tor gives much more control and ease of use to people who provide services and is definitely better for service providers.
Yeah, everything has to be moved to the client. I think it's more complicated than it looks to implement all of SR's features that way (managing bitcoins, for example), and potentially puts users at greater risk when they have to run a Java app made by an anonymous person. If the SR hidden service gets pwned and you anonymize your bitcoins and encrypt your address, there's not much LE can do to you. But if LE compromised DPR and modified his Freenet app, they could pwn everyone.
Yeah that is true.
-
One way to look at it is that Freenet and Tor start from different bases. Tor is based on anonymizing services and access to services, and content is published on top of the services. Freenet is based on anonymizing content publishing and access to published content, and the services are built on top of the published content.
-
I don't use Freenet but I am pretty sure a lot of users run in open net mode until they get a few peers and then switch to darknet mode using a few of those peers as their entry guards.
Ah yep, that would solve that problem.
An IRC friend of mine is a big proponent of I2P and wants everyone to use it, and it does let you do some cool things, like bittorrent and human-readable pseudo-domains, but ultimately the reason I can't bring myself to use I2P and Freenet is because I can't get over the fact that my IP address is exposed to random nodes on the network. I like the privacy that entry guards afford.
I also trust the relays more. There's a big, publicly accessible list of all the relays, with lots of info about them: hostname, geolocation, bandwidth, (usually real) contact info. You can see them running for months at a time, and people run scripts against them regularly to determine if they are acting maliciously. It makes me feel safer than connecting to some random, unknown IP address.
There's also the fact that I2P and Freenet are so small. On Tor, you're one of 500K daily users. That's a nice, big crowd to mix in with, compared to I2P's 20K simultaneous users. I don't know how many users Freenet has, but presumably it's even fewer.
The size and diversity of the Tor crowd are big privacy-protecting features. If you run a Freenet node, there's like an 80% that you're a pedophile, but if you connect to Tor, there' s maybe a 10% chance you buy drugs, a 10% chance you're a pedo, a 5% chance you're a journalist, or whistle blower, or intelligence agent, or political dissident, or just somebody who is privacy conscious, or paranoid, or curious. There are way too many groups to conclude anything about a Tor user, if you can only watch their end.
-
Although, I think the biggest issue with I2P is that there's no equivalent to TorBrowser. Some consider it a feature that you can use any browser, as long as you point it at the I2P tunnel, because a lot of people like to use Chrome, but vanilla browsers are vulnerable to all kinds of privacy leaks that TBB protects against. Eepsites can induce vanilla browsers to run Flash and Java, unless you take explicit steps to disable them. There are also issues with state isolation, cross-site identifiers, disk caching, and fingerprinting a la:
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
If you run Google Chrome with some unique set of fonts and I run Firefox with another unique set of fonts, we are uniquely identifiable across all eepsites. Here are all the things that TorBrowser protects against, which vanilla browsers don't:
https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/
TBB is patched to disable potentially dangerous JavaScript and CSS, without having to disable all JavaScript and break most web sites.
So you can either fix all those problems yourself (and apparently some of them can't be fixed in Chrome), or you can use Tor and TBB out of the box.
For now, I'll stick with Tor. :)
-
An IRC friend of mine is a big proponent of I2P and wants everyone to use it, and it does let you do some cool things, like bittorrent and human-readable pseudo-domains, but ultimately the reason I can't bring myself to use I2P and Freenet is because I can't get over the fact that my IP address is exposed to random nodes on the network. I like the privacy that entry guards afford.
I have never been very impressed by I2P, although it does seem to have the most vocal group of proponents. I personally see it as being similar to the Apple of anonymity networks, it has a hardcore fan base of people who know it is the best, but they don't seem to quite know why it is the best. I guess I would compare Tor to Linux and Freenet to BSD.
The fact that it is so easy to enumerate the IP addresses of everybody who uses I2P is also one of the reasons why I will not even touch it. Freenet is not so weak to this because of Darknet mode, which can be used after running in Open Net mode to essentially give yourself at least the same membership concealment provided by Tor entry guards.
I also trust the relays more. There's a big, publicly accessible list of all the relays, with lots of info about them: hostname, geolocation, bandwidth, (usually real) contact info. You can see them running for months at a time, and people run scripts against them regularly to determine if they are acting maliciously. It makes me feel safer than connecting to some random, unknown IP address.
People run scripts against them to see if they are acting maliciously, but that only applies to exit nodes. Freenet has no exit nodes so there is no need (or even ability really) to run scripts against them trying to see if they are malicious or not.
There's also the fact that I2P and Freenet are so small. On Tor, you're one of 500K daily users. That's a nice, big crowd to mix in with, compared to I2P's 20K simultaneous users. I don't know how many users Freenet has, but presumably it's even fewer.
Freenet is also estimated to have about 20K simultaneous users. There are two ways of looking at this though. Tor certainly has the most concurrent users, I think it actually serves over a million people per day now. On the other hand, Tor has the least routing nodes of the three major anonymity networks (Tor, I2P, Freenet). Tor has about 3,500 routing nodes, I2P and Freenet have about 20,000 routing nodes each. You get anonymity gains by having a bigger userbase as well as by having more routing nodes (in the case of I2P and Freenet clients and routing nodes have about a 1:1 ratio, for Tor the ratio has been about 400:1 .) If somebody can see Tor exit traffic, they know the traffic originated from one out of over a million possible Tor users (since more than a million people use Tor, just not at the same time). On the other hand, if they see content published to Freenet, or somebody accessing an Eepsite, that content/access came from one out of only about 20,000 users. Looking at it another way, assuming all nodes route the same amount of traffic (which they certainly do not, but for the sake of argument. In reality we would need to compare bandwidth added). an attacker who adds 1,750 nodes to Tor can see roughly 50% of the traffic routed through Tor, an attacker who adds 1,750 nodes to I2P can only see 8.75% of traffic routed. In the case of Freenet this isn't comparable though because Freenet works very differently from Tor and I2P.
So from the start your anonymity with Tor is greater than your anonymity with I2P or Freenet, because you have a much larger set size to blend into. But from the specific perspective of an end point timing attack (by far the most worrying attack against Tor), you will be anonymous to the set size until you are deanonymized. This is really roughly speaking though because there are so many other things to take into consideration, but for the most part I think many users of Tor (especially the non-pseudonymous ones) will continue to be anonymous to the set size of users until they are deanonymized with a timing attack. Having a bigger set size to blend into at first is beneficial, but the risk of falling victim to a totally deanonymizing timing attack is also a lot higher because the number of routing nodes is a lot smaller (and therefor it is easier for an attacker to control a larger percentage of them).
The size and diversity of the Tor crowd are big privacy-protecting features. If you run a Freenet node, there's like an 80% that you're a pedophile, but if you connect to Tor, there' s maybe a 10% chance you buy drugs, a 10% chance you're a pedo, a 5% chance you're a journalist, or whistle blower, or intelligence agent, or political dissident, or just somebody who is privacy conscious, or paranoid, or curious. There are way too many groups to conclude anything about a Tor user, if you can only watch their end.
Yes I agree entirely, Tor having so many users is a huge advantage for it. However, I2P having so many routing nodes is also an advantage for it. There is a huge chance somebody using Freenet for a prolonged period of time is involved in CP, however actually proving that is very difficult.
Overall I definitely like Tor the most. It also has the enormous benefit of allowing traffic to exit the network. I2P is weak to an assortment of attacks that Tor is well protected from (although I2P is better protected against other attacks that Tor is not well protected from, for example internal timing attacks), Freenet is difficult to use for service providers, etc.
-
I have never been very impressed by I2P, although it does seem to have the most vocal group of proponents. I personally see it as being similar to the Apple of anonymity networks it has a hardcore fan base of people who know it is the best, but they don't seem to quite know why it is the best. I guess I would compare Tor to Linux and Freenet to BSD.
LOL, that's a great description, and of course that means clearnet is Windows.
A lot of the eepsites are also hidden services, so you can access them over the safety of Tor. Irc2p has an onion address, and I've chatted with the I2P folks there. In general, I find them to be a friendly, enthusiastic group of people who are doing innovative things with that technology.
However, there's not a lot of hardcore criminal activity on the network (mostly bittorrent), so they have no serious adversaries like LE. As such, the security of the network is untested and they are in a honeymoon period. As soon someone decides to distribute massive amounts of CP or run a large drug market or terrorist forum on the network, their illusion of safety may come crashing down rather quickly.
Tor has already demonstrated its resistance to investigations and attacks by the FBI, Dutch police, and Anonymous hackers, among others.
Freenet is also estimated to have about 20K simultaneous users. There are two ways of looking at this though. Tor certainly has the most concurrent users, I think it actually serves over a million people per day now. On the other hand, Tor has the least routing nodes of the three major anonymity networks (Tor, I2P, Freenet). Tor has about 3,500 routing nodes, I2P and Freenet have about 20,000 routing nodes each. You get anonymity gains by having a bigger userbase as well as by having more routing nodes (in the case of I2P and Freenet clients and routing nodes have about a 1:1 ratio, for Tor the ratio has been about 400:1 .) If somebody can see Tor exit traffic, they know the traffic originated from one out of over a million possible Tor users (since more than a million people use Tor, just not at the same time).
I think that number is closer to 3 million, based on annual browser bundle downloads (36 million), and adjusting for re-downloads of monthly releases (divided by 12).
On the other hand, if they see content published to Freenet, or somebody accessing an Eepsite, that content/access came from one out of only about 20,000 users.
Yes, and they also (potentially) know all 20K IP addresses, whereas they know 0 Tor user IP addresses unless they run entry guards, and then they know some single digit percentage of IP addresses.
Looking at it another way, assuming all nodes route the same amount of traffic (which they certainly do not, but for the sake of argument. In reality we would need to compare bandwidth added). an attacker who adds 1,750 nodes to Tor can see roughly 50% of the traffic routed through Tor, an attacker who adds 1,750 nodes to I2P can only see 8.75% of traffic routed.
Adding 1750 nodes (or even a small number of nodes that add 50% more bandwdith) will be much more noticeable on Tor than on I2P, so in practice you may be worse off with I2P, since you would simply stop using Tor.
So from the start your anonymity with Tor is greater than your anonymity with I2P or Freenet, because you have a much larger set size to blend into. But from the specific perspective of an end point timing attack (by far the most worrying attack against Tor), you will be anonymous to the set size until you are deanonymized. This is really roughly speaking though because there are so many other things to take into consideration, but for the most part I think many users of Tor (especially the non-pseudonymous ones) will continue to be anonymous to the set size of users until they are deanonymized with a timing attack. Having a bigger set size to blend into at first is beneficial, but the risk of falling victim to a totally deanonymizing timing attack is also a lot higher because the number of routing nodes is a lot smaller (and therefor it is easier for an attacker to control a larger percentage of them).
It's not really comparable, because most I2P activity is internal to the network. So when discussing a correlation attack, it's only fair to compare "Tor use that only involves hidden services" to I2P, or to compare "I2P use that only involves outproxies" to Tor. On Tor you have 800 exit nodes, but as far as I know there are a scant few I2P outproxies. In fact, an attacker could easily run outproxies and control most of that activity.
A large percentage of the SR community only uses hidden services, specifically the market and this forum. So from that perspective, they are not susceptible to correlation attacks, their IP address is more difficult to enumerate (than on I2P), and they are part of a much larger anonymity set.
Setting aside attacks on the services, would you say SR users are safer on Tor or I2P?
Overall I definitely like Tor the most. It also has the enormous benefit of allowing traffic to exit the network. I2P is weak to an assortment of attacks that Tor is well protected from (although I2P is better protected against other attacks that Tor is not well protected from, for example internal timing attacks), Freenet is difficult to use for service providers, etc.
Yes, Tor's focus on allowing safe clearnet access is a huge benefit, and (I believe) the main reason it is the most popular anonymity network. However, another big weakness for I2P is that there is no safe web browser, leaving I2P users much more vulnerable at the application layer (regardless of network layer considerations).
-
Yes, and they also (potentially) know all 20K IP addresses, whereas they know 0 Tor user IP addresses unless they run entry guards, and then they know some single digit percentage of IP addresses.
For I2P they probably know close to all 20k IP addresses, for Freenet it is not likely that they do.
It's not really comparable, because most I2P activity is internal to the network. So when discussing a correlation attack, it's only fair to compare "Tor use that only involves hidden services" to I2P, or to compare "I2P use that only involves outproxies" to Tor. On Tor you have 800 exit nodes, but as far as I know there are a scant few I2P outproxies. In fact, an attacker could easily run outproxies and control most of that activity.
A large percentage of the SR community only uses hidden services, specifically the market and this forum. So from that perspective, they are not susceptible to correlation attacks, their IP address is more difficult to enumerate (than on I2P), and they are part of a much larger anonymity set.
Setting aside attacks on the services, would you say SR users are safer on Tor or I2P?
Hidden services are still weak to correlation attacks, it just might be a bit harder for an attacker to be positioned to carry them out. I definitely think SR users are safer on Tor than I2P. The fact that I2P users are easily enumerated by itself makes Tor better for SR vendors. If SR vendors used I2P they would be quite fucked, as their crowd size is already "the people who are in this small geographic area where packages are shipped out of". If their crowd size was "The people who use I2P in this small geographic area where packages are shipped out of" they would be totally fucked, and using I2P would result in that scenario. However, there is an argument that people who do not leak their rough geolocation are safer using I2P in some ways. They are definitely less weak to timing correlation attacks than Tor users are, and that is a big advantage. On the other hand they are also far weaker to intersection attacks than Tor users are, due to the fact that they are so easily enumerated. Hidden services can have down time without their anonymity being hurt much if at all, Eepsites that have down time can quickly have their anonymity set size reduced or even eliminated.
Yes, Tor's focus on allowing safe clearnet access is a huge benefit, and (I believe) the main reason it is the most popular anonymity network. However, another big weakness for I2P is that there is no safe web browser, leaving I2P users much more vulnerable at the application layer (regardless of network layer considerations).
Tails has a version of Tor Browser that also supports I2P.
-
Hidden services are still weak to correlation attacks, it just might be a bit harder for an attacker to be positioned to carry them out. I definitely think SR users are safer on Tor than I2P. The fact that I2P users are easily enumerated by itself makes Tor better for SR vendors. If SR vendors used I2P they would be quite fucked, as their crowd size is already "the people who are in this small geographic area where packages are shipped out of". If there crowd size was "The people who use I2P in this small geographic area where packages are shipped out of" they would be totally fucked,
Yep, great point, especially with how few of them there are.
The density of Tor users is fairly low, but not bad.
Looking at just the United States (because the distribution varies too widely from country to country to use the global statistics), there are 90,000 daily Tor users out of the 500,000 total daily users[1]. If my estimate of 3 million monthly users is correct, then there are 540,000 monthly users in the US. Out of a population of 310 million, that is 1 in 575 people.
In a city of 100,000 people, there are about 175 Tor users, which is probably too many to bother investigating unless the vendor is moving kilos.
In a city of 1 million, there are 1750 Tor users, so good luck finding the vendor.
(Alternatively, the vendor could use an obfuscated private bridge, making him impossible to find by watching the network. That defense doesn't exist for I2P users at all.)
OTOH, the density of I2P users is dangerously low.
Assuming that the total number of monthly I2P users is 10 times the number of simultaneous users, that's 200,000 total monthly users.
And assuming the same fraction live in the United States, that's 36,000 people, for a density of 1 in 8600.
In a city of 100,000, there are 12 I2P users.
In a city of 1 million, there are about 120.
I'd say you're fucked if you ship out of anywhere except a handful of metropolitan areas in the United States.
However, there is an argument that people who do not leak their rough geolocation are safer using I2P in some ways. They are definitely less weak to timing correlation attacks than Tor users are, and that is a big advantage. On the other hand they are also far weaker to intersection attacks than Tor users are, due to the fact that they are so easily enumerated. Hidden services can have down time without their anonymity being hurt much if at all, Eepsites that have down time can quickly have their anonymity set size reduced or even eliminated.
And presumably in many cases one can force downtime through application layer attacks, even if I2P is stronger to network layer DOS attacks.
1. It really is 500K, not 1 million: https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html#direct-users
-
hmm, except vendors will connect every day, so if you're watching the network, you can exclude everyone else.
The 90K daily users include people who connect occasionally. The number of people who literally connect daily may be 60K.
Then the numbers are:
Tor users
City of 100K: 20
City of 1M: 200
That makes things substantially worse for SR vendors, so it's best not to connect to the Tor network directly.
-
Their traditional user estimating algorithm shows around 500,000 normal users + 25,000 bridge users, their beta algorithm shows about 800,000 users + 3,500 bridge users. They are not sure which is more accurate yet. It looks like Runa estimates between 300,000 and 800,000 daily users. Apparently I over estimated in saying over a million though. Their traditional way of counting users will not count a user who connects to Tor for the first time in several days and does not stay online long enough in a 24 hour period to refresh their list of Tor nodes through a directory mirror. The beta counts people who bootstrap at the directory authority servers and the directory mirrors.
http://www.terrylucy.com/post/6617697313/should-we-all-be-using-tor-to-help-protect-ourselves
The idea of Tor seems like a movement, a rebellion against the big brother society that we live in today. Can you tell me how many people use the service?
It’s a bit difficult to count anonymous users, but we estimate that we have somewhere between 300,000 and 800,000 daily users. We also have a graph showing the number of directly connecting users from all countries: https://metrics.torproject.org/direct-users.png
And assuming the same fraction live in the United States, that's 36,000 people, for a density of 1 in 8600.
In a city of 100,000, there are 12 I2P users.
In a city of 1 million, there are about 120.
Once you have it narrowed down to 120 you can do an intersection attack trivially against I2P users. You just need to continuously route data through their nodes waiting for them to disconnect, and try to correlate the online activity of the vendor to the up time of the I2P router. ie: if you see the vendor responded to your private message at 8 AM, you can rule out any of the 120 nodes that were not online at 8 AM. That will let you whittle down their anonymity set size even more.
-
hmm, except vendors will connect every day, so if you're watching the network, you can exclude everyone else.
The 90K daily users include people who connect occasionally. The number of people who literally connect daily may be 60K.
Then the numbers are:
Tor users
City of 100K: 20
City of 1M: 200
That makes things substantially worse for SR vendors, so it's best not to connect to the Tor network directly.
It seems to me from reading that metrics page that they still have not implemented directory guards. That makes it substantially easier to enumerate Tor clients. For a long time clients directly connected to the directory authority servers, the first time the client ran Tor and anytime that Tor had not been connected for about 24 hours or longer. Only after that did they use the directory mirrors, of which there are a few hundred. Quite a while ago they proposed adding directory guards, and having Tor users always connect to the DA's or mirrors through a set of random Tor nodes selected from a list of nodes included with the original download of Tor (optimistically trying nodes until you find some that are currently up). I thought they had implemented this by now but now it seems to me that they have not. That means watching the directory authority servers is a good way to enumerate Tor client IP addresses still. No matter what watching the Tor download page could do this though, unless users download Tor with open WiFi from a random location or similar. The best bet would be if they used directory guards + Tor starts coming bundled with popular Linux distros (even if it is out of date and doesn't include TBB, it could be used for the initial download of TBB from the centralized download site). I2P is still much weaker to client IP address enumeration though.
-
Once you have it narrowed down to 120 you can do an intersection attack trivially against I2P users. You just need to continuously route data through their nodes waiting for them to disconnect, and try to correlate the online activity of the vendor to the up time of the I2P router. ie: if you see the vendor responded to your private message at 8 AM, you can rule out any of the 120 nodes that were not online at 8 AM. That will let you whittle down their anonymity set size even more.
If you're LE, you don't even need to route data, just watch their connection.
Earlier I was thinking about a potential correlation attack when the "vendor last online" feature is updated, but messaging them directly provides a more accurate time.
It seems to me from reading that metrics page that they still have not implemented directory guards. That makes it substantially easier to enumerate Tor clients. For a long time clients directly connected to the directory authority servers, the first time the client ran Tor and anytime that Tor had not been connected for about 24 hours or longer. Only after that did they use the directory mirrors, of which there are a few hundred. Quite a while ago they proposed adding directory guards, and having Tor users always connect to the DA's or mirrors through a set of random Tor nodes selected from a list of nodes included with the original download of Tor (optimistically trying nodes until you find some that are currently up). I thought they had implemented this by now but now it seems to me that they have not. That means watching the directory authority servers is a good way to enumerate Tor client IP addresses still. No matter what watching the Tor download page could do this though, unless users download Tor with open WiFi from a random location or similar. The best bet would be if they used directory guards + Tor starts coming bundled with popular Linux distros (even if it is out of date and doesn't include TBB, it could be used for the initial download of TBB from the centralized download site). I2P is still much weaker to client IP address enumeration though.
All of this can be avoided with obfuscated private bridges (since you don't touch any part of the Tor network until after a bridge), or a VPN. While a VPN won't protect you if LE is specifically targeting you, discovering all the VPN users, given the large number of VPN providers in the world, and private VPNs on VPSes, and then analyzing all those users, makes a fishing expedition orders of magnitude harder.
-
WOW, this is some good stuff to read...Well I'm gonna have to read it several times, haha, seriously though this is good stuff..
Love the astor & kmfkewm
Thank you both, :) <3
-
A lot of 5 star posts by astor and kmfkewm! Thanks guys :) :) :)
Intersection attacks and other electronic methods designed to identify particular users on Tor are potentially useful tools for LE, but they'll never lead to a conviction in a court of law unto themselves. No judge or jury would ever understand the methods involved, let alone convict on them alone. But they can sure be used to smoke out and pressure people directly. That's why it's always a good idea to use Tor over a logless, anonymous VPN so you have that extra layer of protection just in case you need it.
-
Intersection attacks and other electronic methods designed to identify particular users on Tor are potentially useful tools for LE, but they'll never lead to a conviction in a court of law unto themselves.
Of course, but they could lead to an investigation. So they start following you around and see you drop packages into blue boxes every day. They combine all that evidence and present it to a judge to get a warrant to search your home. And the actual stash they find is what they convict you on.
You don't want to get on their radar in the first place, especially when it's totally avoidable.
-
Yeah. This is true. The more users on the TOR network, the more secure it is and makes it harder for assholes (the governments) to sniff out nodes.
It's all randomized, so they need at least 30% of all the entry, mid and exit nodes to OWN some of the users that use TOR only some of the time, if they're lucky. And since the TOR network is growing increasingly, it's getting harder and harder for any single organization to posses even 30% of the tor nodes, which is awesome for us, and bad for them. ^_^
-
Yeah. This is true. The more users on the TOR network, the more secure it is and makes it harder for assholes (the governments) to sniff out nodes.
It's all randomized, so they need at least 30% of all the entry, mid and exit nodes to OWN some of the users that use TOR only some of the time, if they're lucky. And since the TOR network is growing increasingly, it's getting harder and harder for any single organization to posses even 30% of the tor nodes, which is awesome for us, and bad for them. ^_^
Also, given that any botnet owner worth their salt runs their botnet on the tor network and run their command and control servers as hidden services and also runs their zombies as relays on the network, it becomes really fucking hard to own a large percent of the relays. :) It's just too damn decentralized.
-
Agreed. Just keep in mind that if LE's methods for establishing physical surveillance of you in the first place are not completely clear (and this kind of thing would be FAR from clear to a sitting judge), their whole case can collapse. Fast. This is why good lawyers are paid what they're paid.
Of course, but they could lead to an investigation. So they start following you around and see you drop packages into blue boxes every day. They combine all that evidence and present it to a judge to get a warrant to search your home. And the actual stash they find is what they convict you on.
You don't want to get on their radar in the first place, especially when it's totally avoidable.