How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour
medium.freecodecamp.com
medium.freecodecamp.com
I have two quarrels with this:
> Andy Grove was a Hungarian refugee who escaped communism [... and] encourages us to be paranoid.
I'm pretty sure that Grove was referring to business strategy, not communications security.
> Congratulations — you can now use the internet with peace of mind that it’s virtually impossible for you to be tracked.
Something I've seen over and over again is that Tor users tend to have a poor understanding of what Tor protects and doesn't protect. The original Tor paper said that Tor (or any technology of its kind) can't protect you against someone who can see both sides of the connection -- including just their timing. Sometimes, some adversaries can see both sides of a person's connection. As The Grugq and others have documented, Tor users like Eldo Kim and Jeremy Hammond were caught by law enforcement because someone was monitoring the home and university networks from which they connected to Tor and saw that they used Tor at exactly the same time or times as the suspects did. (In Hammond's case, recurrently, confirming law enforcement's hypothesis about his identity; in Kim's case, only once, but apparently he was the only person at the university who used Tor at that specific time.)
As law enforcement has actually identified Tor users in these cases, I think people need to understand that Tor is not magic and it protects certain things and not other things. In fact, I helped to make a chart about this a few years ago:
https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https
This chart was meant to show why using HTTPS is important when you use Tor, but it also points to other possible attacks (including an end-to-end timing correlation attack, represented in the chart by NSA observing the connection at two different places on the network) because many people in the picture know something about what the user is doing.
I've been a fan of Tor for many years, but I think we have to do a lot better at communicating about its limitations.
How reliable would this approach be if, say, 100x the number of people who currently use TOR start using it?
It depends a lot on who the attacker is and what they already know about the user.
Tor's best-case is when someone sees only one side of the connection and has no prior knowledge: the guard node (entry) side sees "who" and the exit side to some extent sees "what", but these pieces of information can't be connected. "Oh, this person's using Tor; no idea why!" or "Oh, somebody's reading French Wikipedia; no idea who!" And that's certainly a huge win for privacy and applies in practice matter to many Tor users every day.
If you have a suspicion about the "who" and you can perform some kind of surveillance against that specific person, or you have visibility into activity on a network where some potential "whos" might be or where the guard node they used is located, the picture gets a lot worse, and it's probably still bad if Tor activity grows a hundredfold. But there are other models where increased use of Tor is just what the doctor ordered, like a government that wants to scrutinize every Tor user.
One paper analyzing how bad some kinds of practical attacks are is
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2516651
but that doesn't necessarily cover the whole landscape for how Tor users' privacy might be compromised.
I'm starting to think about writing a "How Tor Fails FAQ" or something (with an emphasis on the fact that I'm a big supporter, have done outreach on behalf of the Tor Project, presented them with an award, and think the technology is the best in its class). The Tor developers will be the first to tell you that anonymity technology is difficult and fragile.