I believe Anonymity is a problem orders of magnitude bigger than privacy. Tor seems like the only serious project aiming at solving it but I think you should be wise by choosing your enemies and Tor in its current state is useless against government-type surveillance for the following reasongs (IMHO):
1) Endpoint security: Tor is a big C project, needs much more code review until it's considered safe. 2) Network analysis: Tor is vulnerable to network analysis. FBI has made arrests to people that were specifically using TOR to hide their activities, and their use of network analysis to unmask them is documented (Jeremy Hammond, Stratfor case). Given those shortcomings I think is not wise to recommend it unless your enemy doesn't have the resources of a country. That being said, it's the best tool at the moment, lights year ahead of other popular software like Cryptocat, whose end-point security should be considered not only sub-par but dangerous. (who in their right mind will consider browser crypto?) Some months ago I tried to fix some shortcomings of Tor by wrapping it in a higher layer and using it for simple network-analysis resistant chat. The result was a protocol so slow that's almost unusable, if someone want to take a look at it it's here: https://github.com/alfred-gw/torirc I would like to see a tor configuration flag that sacrifices speed for anonymity. > Michael Rogers: >>> So who's out there developing any useful protocols for >>> anonymization today? *Anybody*? Could we try to start a new project >>> (if needed) to create one? >> >> I'd love to see a revitalisation of remailer research, focussing on >> unlinkability (which we know many people would benefit from) rather >> than sender anonymity (which fewer people need, and which is prone to >> abuse that discourages people from running mixes). >> > > I'd also like to see revitalisation of remailer research. Though > anonymity as Tor is designed is specifically about unlinkability. To > reduce it to sender anonymity is pretty ... ridiculous. What one does > with an anonymous communications channel is up to them - many people do > actually want that feature for chatting, web browsing, news, email, etc. > > All the best, > Jacob > _______________________________________________ > cryptography mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography > _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
