In modern society everything gather meta data. The phone, the credit card, the mass transit system, cameras with face recognition, the isp, all the routers between A and B, the devices people own, the platforms they socialize on. Its almost impossible to make a face to face meeting without allowing nation agencies to know about it. A leaker wanting to talk to a journalist without risking becoming a target might not be 100% protected by tor, but then I don't know any single better method right now. Some combination of obfuscation, encryption, mixing, and plausible deniability seems to be the best bet.
Go on.
As far as you know.
The same attitude should be expected from all InfoSek vendors. But it's easier to sell a product with claims it will protect you rather than saying the truth (that it's riddled with edge-cases like everything else).
Tor, unlike many of the VPN companies, thankfully lack a marketing department trying to push it with incorrect claims about its alleged ability.
edit: if the threat model is to protect against corporate mass-surveillance ("the big guys"), then Tor is incredibly effective. They wouldn't go through the trouble to identify and blacklist exit nodes and present users with a captcha otherwise. (ofc assuming that it is used correctly: never log in, or if you must only log-in with sock-puppet identities etc).
Do you really think they care about that 1% (made up number) of Tor users using their service legitimately? Or do they just want to avoid being attacked or their service being abused?
Not one person. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Because of a exploited vulnerability, and failure to pay attention to an upsurge in suspicious relays.
Unless you consider that the mistake was using Tor directly, rather than through a VPN service.
A bit more detail would be welcome about those "Hundreds, maybe thousands" of persons. Clearly the security researcher did find a vulnerability in the protocol and confirmed it by unmasking users, but I don't see the support for people getting "tracked down and put into [court]".
More important, what purpose is there to reference a 5 year old patched security vulnearbility? The same year as the above vulnerability was found in Tor, HTTPS was also broken with Heartbleed. The only fool-proof security is security in so many layers that it become statistically unlikely to cause a negative impact.
This is just the outcome from busting one site, PlayPen:
At least 350 U.S.-based individuals arrested
25 producers of child pornography prosecuted
51 hands-on abusers prosecuted
55 American children successfully identified or rescued
548 international arrests, with 296 sexually abused children identified or rescued
The article says that they likely did not have a warrant and simply just went and hired the researcher directly.
But fair enough, the claim that hundreds did get tracked down and arrested, due to a bug found by a security researcher after getting hired by the FBI, is true.
People selling zero days vulnerabilities is a major problem to security. Sadly it is something which new threat models need to take into consideration. The Tor Project did change how the Tor browser bundle updates, and I suspect this event did also caused some ripples in the project in how much they can trust researchers.
Once in while, Tor node operators will complain about DDOS on the tor mailing lists or similar sites. In most of the cases this is just an attempt to figure out guard nodes or real IP addresses of an individual or server.
> More important, what purpose is there to reference a 5 year old patched security vulnearbility?
Sure, it's old, and everyone screws up sometimes.
A few things bother me about it. One is that we know that the Tor Project did notice the malicious relays that CMU people were hosting. From what I've read, they weren't subtle about it.
So basically Tor Project staff said that they screwed up, and apologized. But somehow that just doesn't feel plausible.
There's also some email obtained through FoIA which could be read as evidence that "Tor developers are closely working with the US government".[0]
Sure, maybe that's just paranoia and conspiracy theory. And I do appreciate the delicacy of supporting strong anonymity for Tor without defending child pornographers.
There was a Harvard student a few years ago who got busted for e-mailing a bomb threat (during finals, maybe?) or something like that.
The school reviewed their (Netflow?) logs, found the users on their network who were using Tor at the time and so he quickly became a suspect (and confessed when questioned, IIRC).
If he hadn't been on the school's network, it would have obviously been much more difficult, if not impossible, to find him so I suppose this one could be classified as an opsec fail.
I2P was rather like the love child of Freenet and Tor. Like Freenet, it's pure P2P, where all users route traffic for each other. And although there are outproxies to the open Internet, it's mostly about I2P-hosted content. If anything, it's mostly like Tor onion services.
It uses a version of Tor's onion routing, called garlic routing. The main difference is that I2P tunnels are unidirectional, whereas Tor tunnels are bidirectional. That will allow for content caching and bundling, but that's not implemented yet.
There are reportedly ~10^4 I2P nodes, versus ~2x10^6 Tor users and ~6x10^3 relays. It's been argued that unidirectional tunnels are harder to deanonymize than bidirectional tunnels. But on the other hand, all I2P nodes are readily discoverable by malicious peers, but Tor users are much harder to discover, because Tor clients don't change guards frequently.
So bottom line, they arguably provide similar anonymity.
Edit: Yes, guards can discover users. But Tor is designed to make it hard for a given guard to see that many users. So you'd need lots of guards. And that's not so easy, because Tor folk are constantly on the lookout for suspicious guards, especially when a bunch show up at the same time.
I don't get that. Every guard can discover users because the users directly connect to guard nodes. As a guard you can just collect the real IP addresses of Tor users except they use a VPN or proxy to connect to the Tor network.
Can't edit my other reply. The operator in the OP runs 68 nodes. I did not look at each one, but it looks like most, if not all of them are guard nodes. This article mentions someone running at least 10% of the guard capacity: https://medium.com/@nusenu/the-growing-problem-of-malicious-... Tor's design obviously failed. Everyone can become a guard. You just need some patience. Also other nodes like DirAuths, bridges, fallback directories can discover Tor users.
But regardless, that's why I never use Tor or I2P from home, except through nested VPN chains. I don't care so much about VPS, because I'm very careful to isolate myself from them. For dedicated servers, however, which are more expensive, and where I invest more work for setup, I also use nested VPN chains.
There are single operators that run dozens of nodes. Just take a look at the article. Anyone can setup nodes and give no contact info or just change it to something else. I could spin up nodes as gzer0 and the next week add new ones as gze1. You could run hundreds of nodes as a single person without anyone noticing it.
>and a lot of time and patience
Tor has been around for a while ... Creation of nodes, which mostly are just VM's running in some datacenter, can be automated to some extend.
> and somehow knock off all of the non-malicious guard-nodes
There is no need for that. When you become the malicious guard of someone, by design, you can run correlation attacks for months. Just be patient and probability will do the rest for you.
Tor is not as secure as it (maybe) once was.
Related reading: https://medium.com/@nusenu/the-growing-problem-of-malicious-...
Also when being a guard you get the IP addresses of Tor users. Using Tor puts you in a group consisting of "interesting" people. No, these are probably not thousands of whistleblowers and people from oppressed regimes (well maybe russia). The majority of traffic comes from the US, and western European countries. Interesting people are: hackers, fraudsters, crawlers (guess why many sites block Tor), drug dealers, drug users, pedophiles, literally everything (cyber)crime and people having something to hide. A list of those people would be quite interesting wouldn't it? Even if there would be thousands of whistleblowers these are persons of interest, too.