Re: New attack-vector via covert and side channel

["Steven J. Murdoch" <tortalk+Steven.Murdoch@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 03:59:59PM +0100, kazaam wrote:
> I dunno how public it is but I found today this dissertation by
> Steven Murdoch about attacking the tor-network via covert- and
> sidechannels: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-706.pdf

This results discussed aren't actually that new. Chapters 4 and 5,
which are on Tor, are based on papers published in May 2005 and
October 2006 respectively.

 http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/oakland05torta.pdf
 http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/ccs06hotornot.pdf

I've now published the thesis version of these papers, which have more
diagrams and other improvements, but the underlying data and
conclusions are the same.

To quote from my previous message:

 "To avoid any misunderstanding, I should add that there is no reason
 to panic. Primarily the paper is designed to feed into the future
 design of Tor rather than suggest any short term fixes. There are
 already known attacks on Tor which will probably work better than
 this, but the proposed defences to these will not fix the problem I
 discuss in the paper.

 Also, in the paper, I say that for clarity the results in the paper
 are mainly from a private Tor network and running it in reality will
 be more messy. However, as the performace of the Tor network improves,
 the attack will be more effective, so is worth bearing in mind for the
 future."

 -- http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Sep-2006/msg00080.html

Steven.

-- 
w: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/