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Comment by Santosh83 | Hacker News Reader

How can/does Tor propose to handle government level subversion (which must surely be happening and continue to happen with ever-increasing depth) where "sponsored" computers begin to form a majority of worldwide exit and relay nodes, with modified Tor running on them that looks actively for attacks, and leaks of information?

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Current evidence suggests it's doing OK for now. The slides from the Snowden leaks showed the NSA was unable to compromise the core infrastructure by controlling relay and exit nodes, excepting a few cases. However, there are attacks a government-level entity can mount that Tor explicitly does not protect against, such as large scale passive scanning for traffic confirmation. It is not believed to be possible to beat such monitoring without compromising latency.

That evidence is a few years old now, how far they've come in that time is a complete unknown.

This is a textbook example of FUD.

Since NSA core mission is being ahead of everyone else, a claim that capabilities have increased a lot in the last few years is not FUD.

Without any specific evidence, it's still FUD.

Is there a certain time period after which we can say it's not FUD? Like if we go 10 years without any additional clarification after the Snowden slides, is it still automatically FUD?

I'm confused -- are you asking when an unsubstantiated claim is not FUD?

Not all educated guesses and reasoned estimations are FUD

None are, actually.

What would specific evidence for "we don't know how much progress they have made since the last time we had concrete data about them" look like?

The FUD is implying they've made significant progress. You're right, "we don't know" isn't really a falsifiable statement, in this context.

No claim of present NSA ability was stated. Noting the age of the data in question is a fact. Stating that an absence of new data creates a state of unknowing is a fact.

And you just provided a textbook example of how the term FUD is usually applied.

Fear of an oppressive government hacking the connection and arrest you. Uncertainty of agencies' capabilities given that they operate under top-secret levels with unlimited budgets. Doubt that they would stop working on or advancing the state of the art at defeating the security.

It seems a little unreasonable how much you are being downvoted, the parent comment uses uncertainty to cast doubt on the idea that TOR is safe from the NSA. That can easily invoke fear.

Unfortunately that is largely what we have to go off with the NSA.

Maybe the NSA was unable to compromise the core infrastructure, but the FBI was able to compromise enough to hack into a web forum and log the location data for its users, followed by subsequently impersonating the administration of said forum for two weeks or so, then arresting nearly 1,000 individuals.

They did that by attacking the forum software/the server itself, not tor and the underlying transport layer in general.

It's another layer entirely and does not give information about their capabilities in attacking tor itself (except maybe through the fact that if they had to do that, then yeah, tor is probably still relatively secure if used properly).

can TOR be considered to be on the transport layer though? i thought it worked with TCP, so it would need to be at least OSI level 5 iirc?

OSI level is cute, especially once you start to interpret ip over https ;)

> so it would need to be at least OSI level 5 iirc

You're right; actually tor reside in the application layer I think (above TLS).

Although conceptually speaking it is itself a transport layer I guess.

Tor is a layer 4 overlay network.

Layer 5 would be HTTP, layer 6 would be the content (JPEG, MP4, etc.), and layer 7 would be the application serving or sending the HTTP requests/content.

The combination of watering hole attacks and internet scale packet timing collection is pretty big problem for the security of Tor users.

Fortunately Internet wide timing attacks are mostly a Five Eyes and domestic Chinese capability. Chaff, padding etc can help here.

Compromising the servers of target services and using that a platform to distribute anonymity stripping malware is also a problem. The Firefox codebase that TBB is based isn't awesome from a security point of view. Hopefully the Firefox code base can catch up from a security perspective and give them something better to work with.

Timing correlation attacks would be much more difficult if Tor users were more willing to tolerate higher latency. But they're not. Everyone wants their cake and eat it too.

Internet scale packet timing collection only works when the traffic is not messed with when routing through TOR. It's quite a headache when {proxy}.appspot.com is used, or technical documents are exclusively routed through GoogleCache, or even CoralCDN for that matter.

There's even users who configure BitTorrent to use TCP instead of UDP so that it's very difficult to write DPI rules to parse out the TOR traffic. Couple this with meek, VPNs and traffic shaping tools and it's quite bothersome for them.

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