Saturday, May 23, 2015

Hackers build a new Tor client - Astoria - designed to beat the NSA...

Anonymity’s toughest adversaries are hackers with the full-force and backing of Beijing, London, and Washington, D.C.

With the threat of powerful intelligence agencies, like the NSA, looming large, researchers have built a new Tor client called Astoria designed specifically to make eavesdropping harder for the world's richest, most aggressive, and most capable spies.

Tor, the world’s most popular anonymity network, works like this: A user fires up the client and connects to the network through what's called an entry node. To reach a website anonymously, the user’s Internet traffic is then passed encrypted through a so-called middle relay and then an exit relay (and back again). That user-relay connection is called a circuit. The website on the receiving end doesn’t know who is visiting, only that a faceless Tor user has connected.

An eavesdropper shouldn’t be able to know who the Tor user is either, thanks to the encrypted traffic being routed through 6,000 nodes in the network.

But something called "timing attacks" change the situation. When an adversary takes control of both the entry and exit relays, research shows they can potentially deanonymize Tor users within minutes.

A full 58 percent of Tor circuits are vulnerable to network-level attackers, such as the NSA or Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), when they access popular websites, according to new research from American and Israeli academics. Chinese users are the most vulnerable of all to these kinds of attacks, with researchers finding 85.7 percent of all Tor circuits from the country to be vulnerable. Full story...

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