How do you transmit an elephant? One byte at a time...
But on a serious note, it's possible to transfer 2.6TB over Tor in small pieces (such as file by file or via torrent). Given the size, however, I'd suspect they mailed hard drives after establishing contact with journalists. Even on a fairly fast connection, 2.6TB would take quite a while...
~Griffin
-- On Sun, Apr 03, 2016 at 5:24 PM, Ivan Markin < twim@riseup.net [twim@riseup.net] > wrote: Recently someone leaked enormous amount of docs (2.6 TiB) to the journalists [1]. It's still hard to do such thing even over plain old Internet. Highly possible that these docs were transfered on a physical hard drive despite doing so is really *risky*.
Anyways, in the framework of anonymous whistleblowing, i.e. SecureDrop and Tor specifically it's seems to be an interesting case. I'm wondering about the following aspects:
o Even if we use exit mode/non-anonymous onions (RSOS) is such leaking reliable? The primary issue here is time of transmission. It's much longer than any time period we have in Tor.
o What is going to happen with the connection after the HS republishes its descriptor? Long after? [This one is probably fine if we are not using IPs, but...]
o Most importantly, is transferring data on >1 TiB scale (or just transferring data for days) safe at all? At least the source should not change their location/RP/circuits. Or need to pack all this stuff into chunks and send them separately. It's not obvious how it can be done properly. So at what point the source should stop the transmission (size/time/etc)/change location or the guard/ pick new RP?
-- [1] http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/56febff0a1bb8d3c3495adf4/ -- Happy hacking, Ivan Markin _______________________________________________ tor-dev mailing list tor-dev@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev