Anyone able to comment on the state of Tor security and suggest an up to date OpSec guide to using Tor?
I’d wager only 1% of people on Hacker News would be capable of using a Tor setup for more than a day without getting owned.
You’re better off buying a burner iPod or iPad, stick to public wifi spots, and factory reset it once a week. Even then, watch what you type since vocabulary is fingerprintable.
It’s very hard to stay dark these days.
Do you by any chance have any refs or links at hand explaining the topic more into depth. There are quite a lot on Tor www but covering more common use.
It isn't worth it.
You're in league with wannabe terrorists, misguided natsec journalists, blackhats, child pornographers. For what? What problem are you solving that warrants this heat?
Just use a burner iPad and wipe it frequently. If you're truly paranoid light up a DigitalOcean droplet with a pre-paid credit card and a false name and install OpenVPN on it make an image and cycle your IP. But short of being both a data scientist & cybersec expert (or an actual state actor with training from both) you aren't going to stay black from the NSA and to pretend otherwise is stupid.
Maybe; if US intelligence's high-value targets can be targetted by means that Tor does not protect (compromising endpoints, emissions-based techniques, etc.), and Tor provides US intelligence agents a way to exfiltrate information in a way immune to any but more involved, specifically targetted techniques, it might still be valuable to both have Tor exist and have it used by enough people not on US intelligence payroll that it's mere use didn't finger people as agents.
You have to remember that US intelligence does more than monitor people's communications, it also needs communication channels that are accessible, unmonitored, and deniable for its own agents.
On top of dragonwriter's answer, I'll point out that "U.S. intelligence" doesn't exist as one entity in the way you ask that question. There are a number of groups that cooperate in some ways and compete or just diverge in others. The NSA and FBI want Tor cracked the most to find their targets. Whereas, the State Dept and/or the CIA that back Tor's funding want to protect both dissidents and assets overseas from state-level agencies monitoring communications. They need it to be unbreakable for some set of nation-state attackers.
Now, that doesn't mean that it needs to be unbreakable for the NSA, etc. The original guidance I read on Tor even warned that global adversaries would probably break it. The Many Eyes collaborations have visibility into a lot of the network. They're probably also honeypotting it with high-bandwidth links. It's also written in a tricky protocol in unsafe language on OS's done similarly running untrustworthy apps. They'll probably always have attacks on it for at least worthwhile targets even if State and CIA don't want that. It will still be valuable in many threat models, including NSA if combined with other methods. Especially if about delaying rather than permanently denying them info.
You seem to have no idea about the existence of pluggable transports.[1][2]
> and its riddled with adversaries and malware.
Yes, and so is I2P... Freenet... the Internet?
> Even if you're good you have a separate problem now: Keeping the USG et al from painting a target on you.
Isn't that an argument for using Tor? As Mike Perry (who works now on the vanguard proposal implementation) puts it, "we want enough people to actually use Tor Browser such that it becomes less interesting that you're a Tor user. We have plenty of academic research and mathematical proofs that tell us quite clearly that the more people use Tor, the better the privacy, anonymity, and traffic analysis resistance properties will become."
> Just use a burner iPad and wipe it frequently. If you're truly paranoid light up a DigitalOcean droplet with a pre-paid credit card and a false name and install OpenVPN on it make an image and cycle your IP.
Your IP will be known since you connect directly using your IP to the droplet. Also doesn't protect you from browser fingerprinting which alone may have leaked enough information to identify you.
[1] : https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports.html.en
[2] : https://www.pluggabletransports.info/ (really good folks work on them, and we should appreciate the amount of work that they put in obfs research)
Who is your adversary and what are the costs you are willing to bear to hide from them?
There are very few answers to that question that come out with: "Use Tor"
For the 99.9% of adversaries having a wipeable iPad will stop browser fingerprinting and switching up IPs or cafes will stop IP tracking. It wont stop network attacks, but you'll be pretty safe from 0days. For most journalists (or even drug dealers) it's the right approach.
The rest just gets you more heat than its worth.
Huh??
Down my way, the streets are littered with cameras and I suspect they can match time and IP address and id you easily. This is the same in most industrialized nations probably.
(Not hiding from anybody here, just a thought experiment)
Edit: Very frequently the Police will ask for drivers who have in-car cameras when there is a crime or accident. And a lot of them do have cameras. In Australia.
what the ass does this even mean
Stop this FUD. You can make the same argument about safes, VPNs, disk encryption, paper, roads, etc. etc. ad nauseam.
What are the specific exploits in Tor which are “easy as shit” to use? If you’re unable to be specific, why is that?
except you can't since the ratios are totally different.
Even 5 - 10 years ago, basic disk encryption was seen as pretty sophisticated, in a “what’s at risk if you’re willing to do that?” kind of way. Now it’s standard. You can say similar things for 50 char randomized passwords encrypted on the client, TPMs, TLS by default, etc. etc.
The ratios are likely to change over time as more people realize that their privacy is important.
So much so that I’d like to see an expert recommend it.
Bruce Schneier?
If you're talking with large numbers of people that don't trust Tor then it speaks more to the quality of your friends than it does about the prevalence of this opinion.
That's an unfounded accusation. Micah Lee wrote a very concise refutation of his smear campaign.[1]
> I would be sure someone couldn't pierce the veil of anonymity.
That still doesn't contradict the fact that using Tor is better than not.
[1] : https://micahflee.com/2014/12/fact-checking-pandos-smears-ag...
> That still doesn't contradict the fact that using Tor is better than not.
Is it a fact? If Tor achieves nothing for someone trying to hide from the government except announcing that you have something you want to hide (is that the case? I don't pretend to be certain, but it seems possible) then I'm not sure it's better.
He and I discussed them a bit on Twitter: https://twitter.com/itdaniher/status/961307347950940161
I was not impressed by his response.
The "bunch of emails" seemed remarkably banal. I've written similar emails about sponsored open-source work myself.
edit:
email stack 1: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4367176-Tor-BBG-corr...
email stack 2: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4367193-Tor-BBG-corr...
I am reading the book now so I feel like I'll have a better judgment once I've finished. I didn't find your Twitter exchange very illuminating either way.
If the Internet is such a surveillance threat, and Tor doesn't help, why doesn't this Yasha Levine point to a single alternative?
Edit: Went through this https://twitter.com/itdaniher/status/961307347950940161 It seems he's just a FUD spreader and not someone interested in actual solutions.
As for "actual solutions," what do you have in mind? His claim is that it's a political problem and that throwing tech at the problem won't solve it.
So? It was just an example to show how Mr. Yasha misrepresents and twists facts to fit his preconceived conspiracy theory.
> Is it a fact?
Yes, because of the three hops design.
> If Tor achieves nothing for someone trying to hide from the government except announcing that you have something you want to hide (is that the case?
Millions of people use Tor nowadays that the mere fact that you connected directly to the Tor network doesn't reveal much. Not to mention that there are ways to hide the fact that you're using Tor thanks to pluggable transports.
Are you joking? He wrote entire paragraphs on Tor in his book to push his thesis and you're thinking that it comes down to a matter of differing "interpretations".
Use Disposable Whonix VMs in Qubes OS (available in the 4.0-rc4) for the best secure experience that you can get right now. For less security, an alternative would be to use Tails or Subgraph.
You can also control how much attack surface you expose in your browser in the Security Settings in the Tor Button (Medium (now termed Safe) disables JS on HTTP websites, JIT optimization, and sets media files to click-to-play. High (now termed Safest) disables JS everywhere, and SVG...).[1]
[1] : https://tb-manual.torproject.org/en-US/security-slider.html
To de-anonymize Tails one needs to exploit Tor Browser first, then get root access. For Disposable Whonix VMs in Qubes OS one would need the additional availability of a Xen exploit to break out of the VM in order to de-anonymize it.