How do various embassies contact the mothership? I heard that a lot of them use TOR, and for smaller countries it makes sense. Big countries I suppose have their brew (which is not necessarily safer.)
A properly configured commercial or open source VPN is considerably more reliable and secure than ToR since you have no idea who is listening on the exit nodes or who can execute unmasking attacks by traffic shaping or monitoring if they control enough relays.
For the most part any country which can perform intelligence collection out of its embassy will have sufficient budget and and technical capacity to develop their own secure means of phoning home.
Also for highly sensitive material a diplomatic pouch is still the most secure means of transport as it never leaves your sight and is never inspected and if you do get intercepted then destroying physical media is much easier than securing network traffic to the same level of assurance.
The CIA has it's own onion service: ciadotgov4sjwlzihbbgxnqg3xiyrg7so2r2o3lt5wz5ypk4sxyjstad.onion
Tor was developed by the US naval research lab, it was opened up because an anonymity network only spooks use isn't anonymous.
Smart intelligence agencies are not going to reinvent the wheel (or in this case, the onion router).
>A properly configured commercial or open source VPN is considerably more reliable and secure than ToR since you have no idea who is listening on the exit nodes
If traffic is encrypted this does not matter. (HTTPS also provides integrity checking to show messages were not modified in transit)
Also, traffic to onion services does not exit the Tor network - there is no "exit node"
>Also for highly sensitive material a diplomatic pouch is still the most secure means of transport as it never leaves your sight and is never inspected and if you do get intercepted then destroying physical media is much easier than securing network traffic to the same level of assurance.
They may use diplomatic pouches for especially sensitive information, but the need for low latency communication is strong. What's more likely is that one time pad codes for said communications are sent via pouch, and the communication itself then goes over Tor or some other channel.
(Also it's my understanding Tor uses the exit node's DNS server)
If I needed to design a secure system that didn't need to be anonymous I'd just have it send a HD full of random in a diplomatic pouch & ensure that the packets are sent with encrypted 0s if there isn't anything to say.
And that's only if you think that there isn't a safe pubic key protocol.
Bitcoin's security model relies on public key encryption & there is an extremely large bounty on breaking it. There doesn't seem to be evidence of it being broken yet.
I don't know how much the longer .onions affects generation time - anyone?
For the longer v3 .onions you'll want a different tool, this page mentions some and makes some estimates for finding increasing lengths of characters: https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/onionv3-vanity-address/
(unless you are thinking about high level things, like "lots of traffic" -> "something going on", but tor won't help with that either)
But is an embassy always only "phoning home"?
(and for really secure stuff you will want a channel with constant rate, constant size packets, as others said)
(Though certainly things like packet timing, packet size, etc. might make more thorough analyses harder to escape…)
1. Alice and Bob set up their OTP
2. Alice randomly generates a new OTP
3. Alice encrypts the new OTP with the original OTP and sends the ciphertext to Bob
4. Bob decrypts... the new OTP
5. Alice and Bob burn the original OTP
6. Now Alice and Bob have a copy of the new OTP
I mean, it's pointless. But I don't see how it isn't secure.
jancsika is right in the sense that this is possible, but meaningless. The reason for that is that in OTP, you use your key ("pad") for every transmission, in 1-to-1 ratio to amount of data being transmitted. And you can only use your key once (hence "one time pad")
So let's say you brought 1000 MB of OTP keys to embassy in diplomatic mail, you can use it to send up to 1000 MB of encrypted data, and then you have to get a new one. If you are low on OTP keys, and you use it to send a new one, you'll have to spend 100 MB of "old" OTP keys to get 100 MB of "new" OTP keys -- entirely pointless process, as amount of unused key data won't change.
The Department of Defense is probably one the largest and most sophisticated telecoms in the world. Cannot have dependencies on local infrastructure in countries you are bombing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Information_System_Net...
How much it does so might be, and what it talks certainly is, but that's easily fixed by getting a line with dedicated bandwidth, running an encrypted connection (VPN or something custom) over it, and padding the traffic to ensure the bandwidth usage is constant (if you have a 100 Mbit line and 10 Mbit of traffic, you send 90 Mbit of padding).
The keys for the VPN get delivered via diplomatic courier.