[Plug-security] TOR and secure information transfer

[S Kreimeyer]

Hey everyone,

Last week I overheard a PLUG member discussing the merits of TOR. I
think that this may be a good time to share a little information about
this particular anonymity program. I'm pretty new to the mailing list,
so please forgive me if this has already been discussed.

TOR is marketed as software for anyone interested in keeping their
online activity anonymous. It is intended to obfuscate the origin,
content and destination of information sent online. If you are
interested in how this is accomplished, more information is available in
the link above; however, I'm more interested in discussing a few
weaknesses that I think TOR users should be aware of.

In 2008 it became public that 9 high traffic colluding tor nodes were
operating in Washington D.C. (I'm afraid the reddit link no longer leads
to the story, but you get the idea). TOR is supposed to send encrypted
data in a mostly random pattern across widely dispersed networks to make
its path untraceable; however, if a group of nodes only send data to
each other, then you can see how this undermines the primary objective
of TOR. This story was later dismissed by Jacob Applebaum, a key figure
in the TOR project, whom claimed that the incident was a benign mistake
from 2006 which has since been addressed. This is a probable
explanation. On the other hand, Applebaum is a close affiliate of
Wikileaks, even acting as its spokesman at HOPE, and a wired article
from 2010 claims that Wikileaks intercepted "millions" of sensitive
documents through none other than TOR. That comes off tinfoil-ish, even
to me, but it does give some credibility to the argument that trusting
hackers, like Applebaum, with sensitive information is probably a
mistake.

The point I'm trying to make is that while the TOR model is
theoretically quite robust, it is certainly exploitable. If I were a
dishonest person interested in acquiring a concentrated haul of
sensitive traffic, I would set up a TOR exit node, turn on tcpdump and
wait for a rainy day to look at the logs. For that reason, I would never
use TOR for sending sensitive personal or business information.

For those interested in secure transfer of information, there are much
better ways to protect your traffic than TOR. Client side encryption,
security-conscious network setup, good firewall rules and a decent IDS
will mitigate just about all likely threats.

For those interested in online anonymity, TOR can be a useful solution,
but be considerate of the risk potential. There are much safer ways to
be anonymous online, but that really deserves its own discussion.

Regards,
Sam
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