Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: CHROOT on August 29, 2013, 11:16 pm
-
Last week Forbes and The Economist feature prominent articles about Silk Road, and then...
This week on the Tor e-mail list, Roger Dingledine, the project leader for the well-known online anonymity tool, pointed out that the “number of Tor clients running appears to have doubled since August 19.”
The above graph shows that in less than one week, the number of Tor users has shot up to about 1.2 million from 600,000.
“And it's not just a fluke in the metrics data—it appears that there really are twice as many Tor clients running as before,” Dingledine wrote on Tuesday. “There's a slight increase (worsening) in the performance measurements, but it's hard to say if that's a real difference. So while there are a bunch of new Tor clients running, it would seem they're not doing much. Anybody know details? It's easy to speculate (Pirate Browser publicity gone overboard? People finally reading about the NSA thing? Botnet?), but some good solid facts would sure be useful.”
In the wake of the Edward Snowden news and the National Security Agency revelations, I’ve definitely increased my use of VPNs, PGP (here’s my key!), and Tor. Perhaps I'm not alone.
Others on the Tor list have suggested that it’s a spike from Russia as a result of a newly passed “anti-piracy” law. Anyone have any better ideas?
Link to article: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/08/tor-usage-doubles-in-under-a-week-and-no-one-knows-why/
-
Ive been using tor alot too since i herd. I need to get redphone, tired of watching everything i say.
-
https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html
That is interesting. I was perplexed by the fact that the number of relays increased from 3500 to almost 4500 in a few months:
https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html
but the number of users had stayed the same. I highly doubt this spike was caused by the DPR interview, which hasn't come out in print yet. The online version has received 380,000 views, some of them the same people who visited the page several times. Maybe 200,000 to 300,000 unique people have read that article, not enough to account for a 900,000 increase in Tor clients, even if we absurdly assumed that 100% of people reading the article decided to run Tor and buy drugs on SR (it's probably more like 1%).
For anyone interested, the thread is here: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2013-August/thread.html#29582
The hypotheses range from Pirate Browser to Russian Tor censorship to botnets, but Pirate Browser seems to be the most popular explanation.
-
It's weird.
Sadly, whenever there's a huge spike in Tor traffic, nobody seems cheery about that. My gut reaction was, "If I were evil, what would I gain from having a zillion new Tor clients?".
Didn't come up with much, aside from the obvious: pinning them all to entry guards that Evil Me *didn't* own, or adding significant load to specific nodes (by controlling client path selection) to move other client traffic a more specific direction through the relays.
Pirate Browser or a huge botnet shifting its C&C channel to Tor sounds as good as any explanation.
-
Sadly, whenever there's a huge spike in Tor traffic, nobody seems cheery about that.
I'm cheery about this one. The metrics data shows a small increase in lag, but nothing noticeable while browsing. Meanwhile, we have 1.4 million Tor users instead of 500,000. Our anonymity set just tripled.
-
I bet it's a botnet. I bet it's also related to the temporary extreme lag yesterday, where most hidden services in my bookmarks took several minutes to load. That included Silk Road and Silk Road forums. One imageboard (Torchan) was not affected by it, but other imageboards were.
This list shows the user increase by country:
(CLEARNET) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0Amq69Ncu9Fp_dDlFYWhDZlNCTkdfWGhFWGlCOWFFNWc&usp=sharing
-
Dude I know IRL asked me to set him up with TOR over the weekend. Said "the dark web" was the topic of a recent episode of CSI (or some show like it) .
Hes a super the paranoid type (80's drug war paranoid mindset) and wont even visit hightimes.com for fear of being narc'd on. That TV show introduced him to darkweb and the idea of freedom sparked his interest.
-
Dude I know IRL asked me to set him up with TOR over the weekend. Said "the dark web" was the topic of a recent episode of CSI (or some show like it) .
Hes a super the paranoid type (80's drug war paranoid mindset) and wont even visit hightimes.com for fear of being narc'd on. That TV show introduced him to darkweb and the idea of freedom sparked his interest.
That's great. More people are beginning to realize how important freedom is. Unfortunately it coincides with the fact that so many people have watched their freedom go down the drain lately.
-
Is there a way to check how many people are using Tor in a specific geographical area? For instance chicago? could you use something to check how many tor users there were, so you could decide the best course of action for certain things.
-
Is there a way to check how many people are using Tor in a specific geographical area? For instance chicago? could you use something to check how many tor users there were, so you could decide the best course of action for certain things.
No, they collect very rough per-country averages through a mechanism they designed to be blind to specifics, but don't collect anything more granular than that. By not collecting it, they don't have to worry about it being misused.
-
If you know what fraction of the US population Chicago represents, then as a first approximation you can take that fraction of the national count of Tor users as your estimate of Chicago Tor users.
I did that with my analysis of a potential attack on vendors. I think the number was 200 Tor users for every million citizens, something like that.
-
If you know what fraction of the US population Chicago represents, then as a first approximation you can take that fraction of the national count of Tor users as your estimate of Chicago Tor users.
I did that with my analysis of a potential attack on vendors. I think the number was 200 Tor users for every million citizens, something like that.
Hmm thanks, We really need to get more citizens using tor for standard daily activities. Those numbers even roughly seem fairly low.
Sw
-
Yep, well now it's more like 600, so we're getting there. :)
OTOH, I have noticed a slowdown of the network, and more of my connections have been failing, even to clearnet sites. Bandwidth hasn't increased (these million new clients don't seem to be doing much), but the network may be slower because the relays have to manage three times as many circuits, which requires CPU power to do the crypto operations, and that's always been a bottleneck.
If a million people just joined the network, some of them should run relays. I'd like to see 10,000 on the network.