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Comment by pyvpx | Hacker News Reader

if your attacker isn't apart of the Five Eyes, sure.

I don't know that the Five Eyes have the kind of temporal resolution in their measures that would be needed to conduct these kinds of attacks. In fact, it's very likely that they don't.

> I don't know that the Five Eyes have the kind of temporal resolution in their measures that would be needed to conduct these kinds of attacks. In fact, it's very likely that they don't.

Why is it unlikely for them to have that kind of temporal resolution? I would assume the opposite. It seems like it would be trivial to save timing information along with packets. And the timing data must be relatively small compared to whatever data they're saving on the packets, so the added storage requirement is not really a concern.

Because it's unlikely that they're saving every packet. I suspect they're down-sampling somewhere, given the sheer volume of data.

This isn't to say they couldn't specifically target an endpoint for monitoring, however. Perhaps I was unclear about that.

GCHQ were doing full takes of the internet for 3 days, Tor traffic is nothing compared to that

[0]http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-34103.pdf

I did not know. I guess they could, then. :/

>target discovery

What a lovely euphemism.

One way around that limitation could be real-time analysis with some data buffering. In that way, the timing attack could be done and only those packets saved. I don't really have a feel for what kind of processing this would require, though. Presumably one would also need a low-latency link to the nodes of interest.

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