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Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by singularity2001 on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @05:06PM (#16371264)
Too bad onions was compromised by the NSA. that makes speaking up against the Bad Guys a bit more dangerous.

Admittedly there is a high chance that the Italian high brass has NO finger on the American high brass, however as long as there is no certainty it's a safety risk.

Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by jstanley on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @05:09PM (#16371290)
Even if you believe the NSA have some practical attacks against Tor, are you not still better off using Tor than not using it?
Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by hathawsh on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @05:15PM (#16371326)
Well, anything special you do that covers your tracks may make you look suspicious. If Tor becomes more ubiquitous, maybe it won't draw suspicion anymore.
Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by jstanley on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @05:22PM (#16371389)
Right. Reporting corruption over Tor makes you look suspicious, but they probably don't know what you're doing. Reporting corruption without using Tor means they know exactly what you're doing and will catch you.
Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by tlrobinson on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @05:15PM (#16371341)
Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by singularity2001 on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @05:15PM (#16371343)
What happened to my brain? I just bought the idea that the surveillance state is overall more effective in suppressing criminality.
Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by mar77i on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @06:20PM (#16371842)
It's simple. Hand over the monopoly on information to your surveillance state and you don't get to know when it still doesn't work.

If thinking the govt is broken is treason, you can't fix it any more, but not because it's perfect.

Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by jessaustin on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @07:22PM (#16372266)
Poe's Law, in effect.
Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by singularity2001 on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @05:12PM (#16371304)
better off staying silent
Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by jelly on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @05:16PM (#16371350)
Tor was /targeted/ by the NSA, but I haven't read anything that makes me believe it (or onion routing in general) has been compromised. I get the feeling tor has proven so effective that the only reasonable attack against it is sowing mistrust.
Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by andai on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @06:12PM (#16371791)
The only reasonable attack is using it carelessly. Check out How they got caught:

https://youtu.be/eQ2OZKitRwc

Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by 0xFFC on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @05:12PM (#16371305)
>Too bad onions was compromised by the NSA. that makes speaking up against the Bad Guys a bit more dangerous.

Any references you would want to provide for this claim?

Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by kernelPan1c on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @05:23PM (#16371391)
If you access an http site, a government controlled exit node could inject js and eventually gather enough info through profiling mouse movements and browsing habits to ID you.

Even with https, if the feds are in cahoots with the certificate authorities, you would be just as vulnerable to this sort of injection right?

However, tor hidden services is another story. I think this is where a bad actor would hit a wall.

Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by mikekchar on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @10:02PM (#16373077)
I keep toying with the idea of building a system that allows services to authenticate with you. It's not going to be useful for the general population, but for people who have a clue it would be useful for detecting CA hacks. Theoretically it's not so hard -- you send the service a key when you first start using it. The service signs challenges to prove that they have the key. Now an attacker must both hack the CA and get the private key to impersonate the service. I tried to figure out a way to do it with a plugin, but unfortunately it looks like it requires modifications to the browser to make it work. Thinking pragmatically, I suspect that it would never make it into a mainstream browser (for the same reasons that things like Persona never made it).
Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by jstanley on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @05:36PM (#16371505)
You're probably at more risk of a criminal-controlled exit node stealing your login details than you are of a government-controlled exit node working out your physical location.
Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by kernelPan1c on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @06:05PM (#16371734)
Yes, anonymity and security are separate but related issues.
Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by xeeeeeeeeeeenu on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @06:41PM (#16372013)
> If you access an http site, a government controlled exit node could inject js and eventually gather enough info through profiling mouse movements and browsing habits to ID you.

That's why Tor Browser comes with NoScript.

Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by yjftsjthsd-h on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @08:35PM (#16372676)
And why it's so annoying that it nonetheless sets it to ALLOW JS by default.
Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by jerheinze on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @07:32PM (#16372317)
> If you access an http site, a government controlled exit node could inject js and eventually gather enough info through profiling mouse movements and browsing habits to ID you.

It's impossible for Tor to magically encrypt the whole Internet. With any network that will allow you to access the clearnet, the endpoint will see the plaintext if the website you're communicating with doesn't have HTTPS. You're criticizing Tor for something that's impossible to solve. If you think that's possible then please open a ticket to https://trac.torproject.org/ outlining the solution. (Note that the Tor network is scanned to detect bad exits, and authorities flag them with a bad exit flag but they're still used for onion services and stuff)

Also now HTTPS usage is in the 70% from FF telemetry, and onion services are end-to-end encrypted.

> If you access an http site, a government controlled exit node could inject js and eventually gather enough info through profiling mouse movements and browsing habits to ID you.

Do you realize that the Tor Browser comes with loads of patches to Firefox that seek to minimize the amount of entropy leaked by your browser fingerprint? To be specific,[1]

> Timing-based Side Channels

> Attacks based on timing side channels are nothing new in the browser context. Cache-based, cross-site timing, and pixel stealing, to name just a few, got investigated in the past. While their fingerprinting potential varies all timing-based attacks have in common that they need sufficiently fine-grained clocks.

> Design Goal: Websites MUST NOT be able to fingerprint a Tor Browser user by exploiting timing-based side channels.

> Implementation Status: The cleanest solution to timing-based side channels would be to get rid of them. This has been proposed in the research community. However, we remain skeptical as it does not seem to be trivial even considering just a single side channel and more and more potential side channels are showing up. Thus, we rely on disabling all possible timing sources or making them coarse-grained enough in order to render timing side channels unsuitable as a means for fingerprinting browser users.

> We set dom.enable_user_timing and dom.enable_resource_timing to false to disable these explicit timing sources. Furthermore, we clamp the resolution of explicit clocks to 100ms with two Firefox patches. This includes performance.now(), new Date().getTime() , audioContext.currentTime, canvasStream.currentTime, video.currentTime, audio.currentTime, new File([], "").lastModified , new File([], "").lastModifiedDate.getTime(), animation.startTime, animation.currentTime, animation.timeline.currentTime, and document.timeline.currentTime.

> While clamping the clock resolution to 100ms is a step towards neutering the timing-based side channel fingerprinting, it is by no means sufficient. It turns out that it is possible to subvert our clamping of explicit clocks by using implicit ones, e.g. extrapolating the true time by running a busy loop with a predictable operation in it. We are tracking this problem in our bug tracker and are working with the research community and Mozilla to develop and test a proper solution to this part of our defense against timing-based side channel fingerprinting risks.

[1] : https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/

Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by kernelPan1c on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @10:41PM (#16373258)
> You're criticizing Tor for something that's impossible to solve. If you think that's possible then please open a ticket

Not criticizing tor. Just pointing out a couple of ways in which a tor user could give themselves up by doing stupid things while using tor.

Interesting stuff on timing based attacks. Thanks

Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by confounded on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @05:14PM (#16371323)
I'd be interested too. I'm aware of the Yasha Levine theory, and complains about js in Firefox ESR, but not much else.
Re:Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services by emodendroket on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @07:16PM (#16372224)
Yasha Levine just released a book which is supposed to give a lot of documentation for his claims. It sounds compelling from a few interviews I listened to but I'm not that far into the book.