So Robert Graham, professional security dude and sometimes friendly troll, posted a blog article[0] about weaknesses in Tor, centered on likely attacks by the NSA.
The key, obviously, is the primary assertion that the NSA runs "lots" of Tor nodes. I've seen this assertion before, and while it's certainly a reasonable assumption, I don't know if anybody outside the NSA actually has hard evidence for that. Runa Sandvik's excellent talk[1] at DEF CON 21 started to address this, but clearly more work remains to be done here. Assuming that assertion holds, the architectural criticisms start to matter more: 3 hops, 1024 bit RSA keys, etc. Other criticisms are really about operational security: sending non-encrypted traffic (e.g. HTTP) over Tor that can be monitored at the exit node or running the Tor proxy on the same system as the browser. Actually, that latter is arguably an architectural problem as well, with experiments like Whonix and Portal of Pi[2] trying to address this. These are important considerations for users who use Tor as more than just a free VPN and have a much more complicated threat model. [0]: http://blog.erratasec.com/2013/08/anonymity-smackdown-nsa-vs-tor.html [1]: https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-21/dc-21-speakers.html#Sandvik [2]: https://github.com/grugq/PORTALofPi -- @kylemaxwell -- Liberationtech list is public and archives are searchable on Google. Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at [email protected] or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
