[tor-talk] Is Tor still valid?

[krugar]

this may be a bit of a tangent to your firefox/TBB exploit question, but
it is an answer regarding the validity of TOR:

TOR is not designed to withstand global passive attackers. it tries to
select relays from different AS to create circuits that leave the area
of influence/surveillance of local passive attackers like ISPs or
(smaller) countries.

if you look at the distribution of guard and exit nodes around the globe
( https://compass.torproject.org/ ), you will notice that quite a lot of
them are positioned inside "western" countries, like the US, Sweden,
Germany or the UK. this means that there is a good chance for systems
that sit at the crossroads (TEMPORA comes to mind) to see all
connections that make up a tor circuit, elevating the scope of said
surveillance system from a local passive attack to a global one. whether
GCHQ and friends have figured out how to stitch TOR connections together
is another question, but they should have access to enough data to
deanonymize a large percentage of all tor traffic.

in regards to evading western surveillance, TOR seems pretty much fucked
unless there was an influx of relays in places that do not cooperate
with the western snooping systems AND that do have secure direct
sea-cables between them. if places like that even exist anymore.

cheers :S
-k

On 05.08.2013 20:53, Crypto wrote:
> On 8/5/2013 1:29 PM, Andrew F wrote:
>> Is Tor still Valid now that we know the nsa is actively exploiting holes in
>> technology anonymity tools?  We know that Tor and hidden services has
>> issues, not to mention the whole fingerprinting problems.
>>
>> Is Tor too vulnerable to trust?    Watch the video below.
>>
>> XKeyscore
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSEbshxgUas
>>
> I'm curious as to why everyone is so intent on blaming Tor itself? Tor
> was not exploited. It was a hole in FF 17 in conjunction with the
> application running behind the hidden service. It's like saying "My car
> got a flat tire! Should I ever drive again?" I agree that the exploit
> was a bad one and in turn it's a big security issue. But if we're going
> to point fingers let's not point at Tor. Let's focus on the underlying
> issue(s) that caused this to happen. FF 17 was the target, not Tor.
> Mozilla has addressed the issue. How did the exploit occur? Let's look
> at the application(s) that were running behind the hidden service.
>