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Re:Global Web Crackdown Arrests 17, Seizes Hundreds Of Dark ... by jacquesm on Friday November 07, 2014 @08:52AM (#8572461)
I can think of at least one very easy way to break Tor, if you have access to a bunch of choke points however I'm nowhere near an expert in security so feel free to beat me to death over exceeding my area of expertise.

In a nutshell: assume that Tor hidden services are not amongst the highest traffic sites, that they still need to be hosted somewhere and that you can make your own traffic to such hosts stand out by sending alternate long-short sequences of packets to a hidden service by crafting requests simply inject a long sequence of such packets into Tor destined for the service you wish to unmask, then monitor your choke points to see where the sequence of long/short packets pops out last. That's the endpoint you're looking for. This undoes all the layers of the onion in one move. It will take some time before you have certainty because that same sequence will likely appear a number of times in a regular bunch of traffic as well but with increasing sequence length you should be able to get to good confidence that you have found the relevant host.

Re:Global Web Crackdown Arrests 17, Seizes Hundreds Of Dark ... by owenmarshall on Friday November 07, 2014 @09:07AM (#8572518)
That type of traffic correlation attack is pretty well known and understood. The problem is that Tor simply isn't designed to protect against a global adversary.

If you're the NSA, you can inject traffic through, bisect the network by forcing certain nodes offline, ...

Tor can't defend against that. But we don't have anything right now that would.

Re:Global Web Crackdown Arrests 17, Seizes Hundreds Of Dark ... by 67726e on Friday November 07, 2014 @09:02AM (#8572499)
I believe this has been a well known underlying problem with Tor for a long time as it only really provides anonymity. If you control enough exit nodes, or alternatively, control the means of transmission in enough places, you can narrow the net and get closer to finding things. At the very least, one could get close enough to allow one to focus more traditional investigatory techniques. The problem is this is a fairly large scale problem. Now any organizations with the capacity to do something like that? I seem to recall lots of speculation around the time Snowden came out.