Flaws Spotlighted in Tor Anonymity Network

Flaws Spotlighted in Tor Anonymity Network

www.wired.com

At the Chaos Computer Club Congress here today, researchers from the University of Regensburg delivered a new warning about the Tor anonymizer network, a system aimed at hiding details of a computer user’s online activity from spying eyes.

The attack doesn’t quite make a surfer’s activity an open book, but offers the ability for someone on the same local network — a Wi-Fi network provider, or an ISP working at law enforcement (or a regime’s) request

(visit the link for the full news article)

This is important for those who use TOR or The Onion Router as a means of attaining online stealth. Many global Internet users run TOR as a means of masking their identity. Privacy should not be looked down upon but embraced as a fundamental right. TOR was/is also a recommended method that Wikileaks advocated for would be whistle blowers to publish their secrets.

The methods described (from the venerable Computer Chaos Club in Germany) indicates a potential success rate of up to approx 60%. Law enforcement at the ISP level could develop patterns and reference that data with your "protected" traffic flows. So while this ability is not 100% and TOR still maintains anonymity their is increased potential for peering eyes. The article goes on to show that there are further ways to make this type of tracking difficult as well. In reality any true hacktivist or the like can hide themselves this could primarily impact the average joe who is trying to spill the beans and not take necessary precautions.

brill

www.wired.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

I believe some people were advocating the encryption of traffic between tor nodes with unique keys. Hopefully this is to be the catalyst needed to make it happen.