Comment by gye | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gye | Hacker News Reader

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This can be refuted pretty easily, on various grounds.

One, you are assuming that all parties interested in deanonymizing Tor collaborate. As you say: agencies, not agency.

The design makes sure that you do not need to trust any node in particular. The damage individual nodes can do are small and basically amount to temporary denial of service for non-exits (which clients will quickly route around) and messing with your traffic as exit (which becomes less and less of a problem as everything moves to e2e, and https is improved/hardened with key pinning etc). The remaining problem is statistical correlation, where studies show it is actually not trivial to perform and takes time and repetitive behavior.

Your argument also assumes that everyone is immediately fucked when one powerful adversary can break the anonymity. This will very rarely be the case in real scenarios, where "the NSA" will just not care about you, but plenty of other actors might. By spreading not necessarily false but very simplified claims, you are drawing users who don't know better to systems where they will be clearly much worse off!

The list of relays is public. There are actually surprisingly few exits that carry most of the traffic, which yes, is a weakness, but that weakness is still stronger than anything else you could compare it to. You can look at the large operators like universities and nonprofits like www.torservers.net, their relays, and you will see that it does not take that big of a budget to run the majority of all exits in terms of total capacity. Is is much easier even to contribute high bandwidth entry nodes -- again, feel free to check the largest non-exits in terms of capacity, and investigate the motives. It's all public information.

I say all the following as someone who is generally pretty pro Western Intelligence and skeptical of any tinfoil hattery, BUT:

> As you say: agencies, not agency

This seems to willfully ignore the immense degree of cooperation between Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, SSEUR, etc. It's hard to get real numbers, but I think one would be safe in making the assumption that spending of Five Eyes + friendlies absolutely dwarves any other intelligence expenditure. So call it "the NSA" or whatever, but we are referring to the giant, interconnected "Western Intelligence" supra-national agency whose capabilities were considered to be the stuff of science fiction before the Snowden leaks.

> The remaining problem is statistical correlation, where studies show it is actually not trivial to perform and takes time and repetitive behavior.

You are disingenuously shrinking the problem space here, by pretending that Tor is somehow bug free, or that all known bugs and flaws are already known. This is vanishingly unlikely. The question is not "are there exploitable bugs in Tor", but "how many zero-days do these organizations have?"

Further you hand-wave away a well-known problem by saying it's "not trivial to perform". You're talking here about an organization that literally taps underwater cables with specialized submarines, and arguably scans and extracts metadata from virtually _ALL INTERNET TRAFFIC_.

The parent said:

>> "I’m confident the government can demask users on demand as needed."

which you then attempted to reduce to the absurd by saying:

> Your argument also assumes that everyone is immediately fucked when one powerful adversary can break the anonymity

Which is a bizarre reading.

> feel free to check the largest non-exits in terms of capacity, and investigate the motives. It's all public information.

Other people's motives are "public information"? Lulz.

So you think using Tor is worse than not using Tor and connecting to everything plaintext?

My understanding is that Tor is not a permissioned network. This means that anyone can run a node without asking for anyone’s approval. If this is the case, a trivial amount of money in terms of the USA defense budget ($100mil - $1 bil) could be spent to selectively reveal entities that the gov finds worthy of arrest.

Everyone be careful, nothing is as simple as it seems. Notice how I’m responding to an anonymous user. This is expected.

Again, very simplified. The design makes sure everyone knows about the same network. The network is being monitored by independent folks constantly, and you cannot just ramp up lots of capacity without anyone noticing. Not only the current state, all past states of the network are recorded.

You also make it sound like there would be an alternative design, like a closed set of operators. Now, that would obviously be worse than an open system. All you need is two non collaborating entities in your path.

Note how I am trying to convince you with facts, whereas you point to my preference of anonymity as something that makes them less worthwhile. Such ad hominem attacks should be avoided in serious discussions, thanks. I value my anonymity.

It goes the other way too, as revelations have come out about NSA network siphon implants at AT&T and Verizon (and a person can assume if they are on those networks snooping traffic they are on all meaningful interconnects). You can greatly reduce the amount of hard inserts in the entry and exit nodes required for many of these attacks if you have access to the streams of traffic before and after the nodes that you do not control. Even with the padding projects on Tor I would bet pretty hard money that today, and for the last 2-5 years tor has effectively provided 0 anonymization benefit (against state actors) to its users. Now if you are asking does it provide such benefits to users against other parties that are not as well placed or funded -- I think that is a hard yes.

But like most other things related to tradecraft, I doubt we will know the true case for decades (if ever). I mean there were rumblings that NSA had siphons in major pops for 20 years before it was confirmed -- and you could not count how many times people that stated that belief over the years were looked at with suspicion/disbelief.

"State actors"?

This is implying that over 190 countries have that capability, and it is available to all "state" organizations. Like so many comments on HN, saying that it offers "0 anonymity", this shows ignorance of what is going on in the rest of the world, and the kind of surveillance the world's population is under.

Further above, Five Eyes were mentioned. From the Snowden leaks it is known that some eyes get assistance for sacrificing all data upstream to NSA, but its not like all participants have equal access. So even claiming that "any" "Western" "state actor" has that capacity sounds far-fetched.

Also, this is ignorant of all the non-state actors interested in your data.

If you want to be pedantic, then lets clarify my statement that:

given anonymity requires that your identity is not known by any other entity and

given that it is known that at least one state actor has known ability to inspect/siphon much of the traffic around the world either directly or through data sharing and

given the ability to inspect traffic at such locality and breadth allows for unique attack vectors to tor which greatly reduce the need to park/own ingress or egress nodes

It is highly likely that there is no (0) implied guarantee of anonymity for any specific user on Tor.

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