Hacker News Reader

Comment by shushan | Hacker News Reader

Even if authorities were able to track down someone through TOR, I doubt they'd publish it. More easy to let black hats think they are safe.

View on HN

Right, but then they'd be prosecuted, and the means would come out. You wouldn't be able to both put people in jail based upon evidence gained from compromising TOR, as well as keep secret the fact that TOR was compromised. Not for long, at any rate.

Pretty simple really, at least in the UK. Just get someone to make an allegation against them (underage porn, etc), and their computers get seized. If the police just happen to discover a ton of other things they're really involved in whilst analysing them, there you go. If encrypted, under UK law you have to divulge the keys or go to jail, so you're guaranteed to get them some jail time.

Just get someone to make an allegation against them (underage porn, etc), and their computers get seized.

Is that legal in the UK? Because in the US it'd be unconstitutional.

I've seen news about child porn allegations in the UK that usually lead to nowhere in the latest years, mostly because of some credit card issues. I remember it happening with Pete Townshend (from The Who) and Robert Del Naja (from Massive Attack), plus some football player whose name I can't remember.

Unconstitutional doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

In the UK they can seize your computers from your home for creating a public nuisance or wasting police time (they actually did this to a journo a few years back). Oh, and they don't give them back. I mean yeah I think they're supposed to but they don't exactly get around to it quickly.

I'm pretty sure confidential informants are tailor made for covering up illegal or undisclosed investigation techniques. It's not like they haven't had a little practice trying to protect wiretaps.

Which isn't to say that I think the feebs have compromised TOR, because I think that's pretty unlikely.

That's an interesting perspective. Still, in order for the anonymous source's testimony to carry any weight, there'd have to be some solid evidence. Either they'd have to show traffic logs, or they'd have to show the results of forensics done on the suspect's hdd. If you've properly distanced yourself from your activities, then there shouldn't be anything on your hard drive to implicate you.

Ultimately, it comes down to human fuckups. Bradley Manning is not in jail because he didn't take security precautions, he's in jail because he talked to someone he shouldn't have. The same will be true of any reasonably sophisticated hacking organization. They can take all the precautions in the world, but a vengeful ex can bring the whole thing crashing down.

If they were serious about the investigation they'd probably get a sneak and peak warrant to install a keylogger/etc. (either electronically or physically) instead of just a smash and grab. That way they'd have some good trial evidence, because as you say relying on forensics for computer crime is quite dicey - something the bureau is all too familiar with. If they can beat the system electronically this also gives them a chance to see whether there is anything that'd make a quick seizure worth it.

The law enforcement exposure they just did undoubtedly made it much easier to get warrants or FISA approval if they did have some targets.

If you are interested in some hypothetical pondering about how secure Tor is not, here's some food for thought: http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1293530004.html

"P.S. I have a long bet that SELinux is an NSA backdoor. Any takers?" Really? Zed Shaw lost the credibility to talk about anything security related with that one sentence ...

Yeah -- as if the NSA would be unable to crack software if it were not for SELinux.

There's a lot to be said about super-node pattern analysis with TOR, as well as the flaws in the exit nodes with regard to unencrypted communications, but I couldn't get past the fact that Zed's entire post was a massive Godwin.

Zed will be Zed.

Addressing his points one by one (quotation marks should in no way be thought of as referring to a quote):

"The Navy made it, why'd they release it?"

-They released it because it's entirely useless if the military are the only ones using it.

"It's not theoretically effective. There's lots of ways to break it."

-Sure, there have been papers written about ways to break TOR. I've yet to see someone actually do it. That doesn't mean the NSA or whoever isn't doing it, but you'd think if someone had compromised the system you'd see some story about it. Somebody who was using TOR would have been tracked down and they would have thought, "hey, wait a minute..."

"Project Vigilant"

-Meh. Again, if they compromised TOR, you'd hear about it. They'd have given the IPs of hidden wiki visitors to the feds, and some pedo would have been arrested. If PV don't care about pedos, they would have given the feds some information about somebody that would have led to some sort of action. The fact that none of this has come to light is pretty strong evidence that PV has not compromised TOR.

"Wikileaks uses TOR"

-So the fuck what? They have a pretty clear use case, and the fact that ioerror is a contributor means he's concerned about anonymity (for obvious reasons), not that Wikileaks has hatched a plot to snoop on anonymized traffic and leak details. Why the hell would they bother? They've got more than enough stuff to leak handed to them. What are the chances that someone using TOR would be transmitting data that WL would care about?

This is just stream-of-consciousness FUD from Zed, of the type we're used to seeing from him. He throws out a bunch of what ifs and pretends it's an argument. Show me the evidence. Show me some indication that TOR has been breached and I'll be the first one to question whether it should be used. In the meantime, TOR is only getting more secure as more people talk about it and use it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com