Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

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If you are using Tor for unencrypted connections to the internet, then sure, the security is going to depend entirely on the honesty of the nodes.

But what about when no exit nodes are involved, when you connect to hidden services? And if your underlying connection is properly encrypted, then the most that could be divuldged is metadata. You'd have to believe the U.S. government has also broken popular crypto, and I believe that if that were the case we would've never seen things like Dual EC DRGB. Even powerful quantum computers could only weaken cryptographic algorithms, if my understanding of Shor's algorithm is accurate, so you could always use paranoid-sized keys or post-quantum cryptographic algorithms.

The folks that work on and support Tor are by all accounts some fairly intelligent people. It is obviously very possible the whole network is compromised, but it would be very impressive if it was compromised and nobody ever found out.

I think software like Tor-based IM is still useful even in the event that the network is compromised to some degree.

You should operate on the assumption that a significant fraction of the Tor nodes are hostile. The value is simply too high not to operate that way.

Given that, I would at a minimum route your network through an anonymous VPN (or two) before touching the Tor network.

It all depends on your opsec requirements but don’t be a naïve fool - Tor is not a magic anonymity service. It has pros and cons like everything else.

Where can I get such an "anonymous" vpn? The VPN providers are selling the traffic logs and/or charging you in a traceable way, while Tor literally routes you through multiple VPN servers (aka Tor Relays) to mitigate this risk.

Pay for your VPN with privacy coins or run your own VPN. Of course the unethical and illegal method is to compromise a number of systems to route traffic, but obviously that’s problematic.

Problem is how do you trust the VPN operator? They have your connection metadata, and no reason not to use it against you. If you want a trusted first hop into the Tor network, use a guard node run by a friend or yourself: https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/5qmqw4/should_i_be_usi...

> Pay for your VPN with privacy coins or run your own VPN.

That doesn't matter since you're still connected to them with your IP address, plus there's the additional problem of browser fingerprinting which alone may leak enough information to de-anonymize you and let us not even mention the lack of first-party isolation. Running your own VPN is even worse since it basically links you to all of the traffic.

VPNs can be purchased with BTC. Mullvad is a provider that is relatively trusted, and you can use it with Wireguard, can even do multi-hop.

You probably don't want to connect with a home cable connection. Break into other WiFi or use public WiFi hotspots. Preferably never the same one twice.

Compromised machines can be a mixed bag and require some actual work, but people definitely use them as additional routes in their chain of proxies. You could also use cryptocurrency to buy VPSes to use as VPNs potentially, which offer usefully different privacy characteristics than VPNs as a service.

Even if you get everything else right, the worst enemy will always be you. You need to regularly cycle identities, never reusing them or linking them back to previous identities. If what you're trying to accomplish does not make this possible you most likely are not going to be able to stay anonymous forever.

This is basically the same advice you'd give to someone trying to commit crimes. Well, if you consider any potential adversary to be a threat, it's pretty much the same approach. I think it's wild overkill for most folks because most folks would never have even nearly good enough opsec for this to matter - I know for a fact that my opsec is simply not going to be good enough, I'm just not that organized. For most of us, the best approach is to just not give three letter agencies any reasons to want to destroy our lives. It's easy if all you want to do on the internet is listen to music and talk about programming.

Still, despite the fact that I don't really have any need for this, I find it to be a really fun thought experiment. And there's some pretty good talks about it, too.

> VPNs can be purchased with BTC.

That doesn't matter since you're still connected to them with your IP address, plus there's the additional problem of browser fingerprinting which alone may leak enough information to de-anonymize you and let us not even mention the lack of first-party isolation.

I would argue that using a VPN while routing under the Tor network mitigates any possible security that was originally provided by Tor.

Even if there is N% possibly that a three-letter agency can find an identity correlated to a Tor client in M time, VPNs are much more likely to either be malicious or compromised. And worse, most if not all VPNs don't onion or scatter-route traffic; every single network request goes directly to the VPN provider whom I must explicitly trust.

Granted, this isn't a problem if you run your own WireGuard/IPSec/OVPN instance on your own hardware, but for most people in unfree countries this simply isn't possible.

What's worse is that now not only do governments possibly collect your data, but a random third-party entity as well. Because of this, I only use VPNs when the alternative is nothing at all (like airport wifi that blocks Tor connections).

> But what about when no exit nodes are involved, when you connect to hidden services?

OP is claiming that a combination of traffic/volume analysis and dishonest nodes can find a hidden service source.

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