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Re:Detecting Tor Communication in Network Traffic by andreyf on Saturday April 06, 2013 @06:13PM (#5505244)
tl;dr: TOR traffic looks like https, but can be detected via traffic analysis. There is more info on how traffic analysis can chip away at TOR users' anonymity in this paper: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/oakland05torta.pdf
Re:Detecting Tor Communication in Network Traffic by GoofballJones on Saturday April 06, 2013 @06:26PM (#5505290)
That's a rather old paper though, it's 8 years old and I could have sworn that it was shown to not be effective in detecting current TOR traffic. From what I understand, you have to have massive traffic shaping capabilities to even begin to "chip away", just not a viable nor efficient solution as it takes huge resources. They're not going to devote that amount of time and money just to shut down a few nefarious drug resellers or other places.
Re:Detecting Tor Communication in Network Traffic by andreyf on Saturday April 06, 2013 @06:42PM (#5505334)
Good call, I didn't notice that. Thanks for pointing it out.
Re:Detecting Tor Communication in Network Traffic by pdog on Saturday April 06, 2013 @06:45PM (#5505342)
Detected but not decrypted, unless you're an exit node. TOR is still fundamentally sound, especially in the past few years.
Re:Detecting Tor Communication in Network Traffic by moxie on Saturday April 06, 2013 @07:08PM (#5505407)
That depends on why you're interested in Tor. While my sense is that it was originally designed as an anonymity tool, it seems to have really exploded for use as a censorship circumvention tool.

Most of the latter types of users are probably much less interested in whether the destination website can identify them, and potentially much more interested in Tor traffic going undetected by censors.