Tor: 1100 relays still run end-of-life tor versions
lists.torproject.org
lists.torproject.org
1 - https://blog.torproject.org/tor-security-advisory-relay-earl...
2 - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/activ...
It's nice that people still run exit nodes, but it's so expensive and dangerous that you cannot expect a satisfactory number of nodes to be run for moral reasons and not for monetary/surveillance ones.
Also since most of the nodes are run on VM instances, a few companies could potentially recover all the routing and keys from the servers RAM if they feel like it. They're not going to do it for the average joe, but things like the Patriot act and it's European equivalents make sure intelligence agencies can do it if they want.
I realise this effectively cripples Tor, but normal "uncensored" exit nodes can still operate, by those willing to run them.
The developers basically replied that while they're not happy about how Tor is used by some people, if they started censoring some things, they would eventually be required to censor others. At that point, what is really the point of Tor - just chain some VPNs together.
Anyway, thinking further, I realised even a whitelist can be bypassed in various ways to do illegal stuff, so you'd still need to be quite prepared and legally informed before running an Exit node. :-(
TOR was developed to protect american spies, so it's exactly its purpose: to defend against state actors.
For example, if they want to know who owns a specific tor hidden service they could get the lawyers and higher ups to pressure amazon and microsoft to dump rams of all their customers (and manage all the secrecy so to not create bad PR), or they could just make a search on their vulnerability database and attack the website directly. They can also just put a well trained and experienced detective to find traces from the operators that they might accidentally make on facebook, stackoverflow and so on. They can have an agent go under cover or try recruit people close to the target. Each of those have costs and risk that is far cheaper than attacking the tor network, and having read a lot of stories in regard to the silk road, wikileaks and other users of tor it seems that this is indeed the primary way state actors operates.
Users pay its yearly fee via Bitcoin. Once a year.
Tor client authenticates to entry node with wallet ID. Node checks in blockchain that fee's been paid and forwards traffic.
Plus - clean nodes operated by trusted Tor project team.
Minus - experts need review that wallet checking is not a deal breaker. I have not really thought this through, just throwing ideas :))
... time machines and Part 2. I Love this guy :)
But it does not kills the idea, imho. Buying and paying coins anonymously is a different, independent area.
Came to my mind that this subscription model may spawn several Tor networks, trust whichever you want, like with VPN providers. Just keep the Tor code maintained by the public.
And several networks may use each other's nodes ... Cyberpunk in its best
i'm in a similar position. i find crypto interesting but i don't understand it well enough to be confident about the anonymity provided. a concern i have is that people are already looking for ways to deanonymize crypto wallets and tor users separately. to link tor to crypto wallets would seem to increase the attack surface to deanonymize tor users. i'll leave it to those more knowledgeable than me to say how much of a risk this really is.
again, i do think it is very important for the long term viability of tor to create more incentive for users to support it financially.
Yeah, that was the idea, nothing grows without money. Trust me, people will pay money for Tor once model is proven to be secure and anonymous.
There is private networking, Tor, but it needs private money to run.
There is private money, coins, but it needs private networking to run.
Lets merge them together, somehow :) Onion Coin need to be established in .onion domain only, dark web (onion) exchanges converting Onions to 'meat' (a.k.a IPV4) internet coins, to pay for Tor nodes.
Got me googling stuff (yeah, shut up), found deeponion.org - cryptocurrency sent through the TOR :)
I'm just as curious as you what the GP's internet setup looks like.
Your IP is still going into every single blacklist of corporate gateways though (because F5, etc. don't care): so don't host multiple services on that IP/server.
An exit node is the most dangerous position to be in, because that's were all the bad stuff can be seen.
Hopefully it's easier now than it was then.
As others said relay nodes are safe and low risk to run. I wouldn't run an exit node without looking into the legal risk and having a plan.
When it come to the legal part, it depends.
Being a exit-node can be very tricky. In some country, you will have to register has a telecommunication provider in order not to be considered liable for whatever comes out of your relay.
Being a guard-node (the "entry" node for tor client) is usually safe but can still create some trouble. For example, the virus WannaCry was using Tor to connect to its C&C servers. Due to this, some Tor guard node got seized by the French police because they saw WannaCry connect to the IP of those guard node and I guessed, decided that it was necessary to seize them for their investigations ...
But you can configure your node to never be chosen has a guard node and to be just a relay and not a exit node. The node will be the middle man between a guard and a exit node and that should be completely safe, unless you live in a country where technology to circumvent censorship are prohibited.
https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/trust/content_trust/
* https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-re...
I understand the general security benefits of automatic updates, but on something with as big a target on its back as Tor, isn't it asking for trouble? An attacker could poison an update and make vulnerable the entire network for as long as it takes for the Tor Project to discover the problem and patch it.
How does the security professional balance such issues? I can imagine mitigating the risk with rolling updates, but the 0-days aren't patched immediately.
It could still expose a vulnerability meaning someone could kill the whole network, but that’s better than compromising it.
DisableAutoDisable I_Know_What_I_Am_Doing
For example the 1213 days of presumably no updates by f2n (mentioned in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17150526 )
(Of course, the lack of patches means that, once someone gets a RCE on either of these daemons, it's probably game over for the host.)
Do these operators actually even know they are EOL'd?
1. This report mainly deals with Tor relays. A Tor relay is not a Tor Exit (well, you can argue Exit is a special type of relay). Tor relays can be run on all servers, optimally, with fixed IP address, bandwidth >10Mbps (do set appropriate bandwidth limit in /etc/torrc, or it burns all your bandwidth), anyone can help the network by running one. Tor relays only generate encrypted traffic to other Tor relays, and risk of running one relay is even lower than, let's say, a BitTorrent client. All you need is 5 lines of /etc/torrc, but better to tune the networking stack first.
2. Tor Project does not run any Tor nodes(x), most operators are enthusiasts, others are NGOs and privacy service providers doing a charity. If you read the [tor-relays] mailing list, you can see the people are just like those who run their personal email servers. Enthusiasts consist the people who are both networking hobbyist (understand networking, BGP, also familiar with network/server providers(x) around the world, for getting the maximum bandwidth, OVH, anyone?), and privacy enthusiasts (who know what is public key cryptography, uses GnuPG, follow security news, etc). There are lots of networking hobbyist (okay, not too many), and privacy enthusiasts. But only those people who have BOTH the hobbies, would eventually find their way to the [tor-relays] community, a small number.
2a. You see, the major obstacle of the growth is lack of publicity, and misunderstanding of Tor relays/exits. In 2014, EFF started a "Tor Challenge", and resulted a surge of 1,700 new nodes. Most of the nodes are STILL ONLINE (and probably being forgotten and hence outdated...). The speed of the Tor network has increased significantly due to the growth of interest since 2013, but more relays are always needed, currently there are less than 7000 nodes. Do you want to run? Start from https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorRelayGuide
3. Tor almost uses a rolling release model. The development pace is fast (but developers are not too many, need more), you can see Alpha versions being released almost every week. And they are more like a "mainline" version rather than a "alpha" version, and most of the time these "alpha" is already stable enough for casual uses. After the next alpha series is released, the current alpha is promoted to the "stable" series. This release model has some problems with traditional Linux/UNIX distros. For example, the Tor version in Debian (not Tor's) and OpenBSD's official repository is ALWAYS outdated by an entire series, since it has been freezed since distro's release date. Recently Tor just made another release, renders lots of current server being completely outdated.
4. Running a Tor Exit generally requires more cares of the servers, routinely respond to abuse mails, diagnose server problems and optimize performance. I haven't check, but I guess only a small percentage of these outdated versions are Exit.
4a. Running a relay is easy, most relay operators set up their servers in a fire-and-forgot basis, the servers are barely being touched anymore, once it has been configured and running correctly. Once the relays are up, many people simply forgot their existence at all, except they pay the bill. Just like many people's email server... And it's hard to contract many of them due to its decentralized nature, and most people don't actively follow [tor-relays] mailing list. Many careless operators also don't actively check their contract emails. Few of them even don't bother to leave contract information, or name their nodes (default: i_didnt_edit_config)...
5. Because Tor releases often, occasionally some people don't want to deploy updates until the next major maintenance reboot, because they don't want to lose the high uptime and large traffic they've waited to get for months (for new nodes, Tor traffic reaches to the maximum only after 3 weeks of continuous operation)...
TLDR, I guess automatic update is the solution, since the update is already signed. Also, we may need to make running Tor relay a more interactive process.
(x) Even authoritative servers are contributed to well-known members of the developer community, in a individual basis. (x) But don't use OVH for your new Tor relays, it's already the largest network of Tor nodes thanks to the cheap bandwidth.
Old versions need to be something akin to a burnable one-time-pad, that gets burnt when deemed more vulnerable than it's up-versioned, more secure replacement.
In many ways, this kind of sucks as an idea, but in pragmatic terms, I just really wouldn't want idiots relaying traffic I'd feel paranoid about, in ways that'd cause me to lose sleep at night.
That said, I don't even think the routing protocol has honest merit. The idea that you should place an all-consuming degree of trust in the honor system surrounding exit node operators having total access to plain-text traffic is beyond-the-pale in its stupidity.
No one can field a satisfactory answer for me, regarding why it's okay that exit node operators have access to plain-text traffic.
Oh, because traffic analysis
is hard, and most exit node
operators are amateur hobbyists.
That's just the way it works.
You can't make TOR work any
other way.
Okay, but that's not what TOR is trying to accomplish.
An ideal system would operate in such a way that reading an ordinary public resource requires no single peer. If I want to simply read a wikipedia page, no single individual should be capable of knowing that I requested that page, and be tasked with the entire responsibility of proxying my request. No single peer should even know that a wikipedia page is what I asked for, who I asked for content from, or where I've been and what I've been doing.
Right now HTTPS offers content privacy, but no meta data privacy. TOR offers a degree of meta data privacy, but no guarantee of content privacy. Even with the two combined, the TOR exit node can still understand that someone logged into Gmail, and someone probably tried to send a message with an overall length of ~2MB.
With a strategic vantage point, enough facts could become evident, that TOR would fail to offer enough protection, and still out someone trying to accomplish a secret task with TOR.
It should be possible to provide both content privacy and meta data privacy, so that my solid gold widget factory plans are mailed safely to my vacation home, and no one knows that I mailed them to myself, that I mailed anything at all, or what I mailed if that's what I was doing.
I don't care about how "it" works, if TOR can only suck one way, and can't not suck some other way. I want something that doesn't suck. I already said I don't want TOR. TOR doesn't need to be something else. It just needs to stop telling people it's something better than it actually is.
HTTP is a stateless protocol, which is why what you're describing is not possible. You could design a protocol that let you split up requests in the manner you describe, but that protocol would not be HTTP.
Just because you have trouble imagining the implementation of such a thing doesn't mean I do, and doesn't make it impossible.