Re: [tor-talk] How secure is a hidden service?

[Mirimir <mirimir@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 02/21/2020 03:41 AM, Roger Dingledine wrote:

<SNIP>

> Services on the internet are inherently harder to make safe than clients,
> (a) because they stay at the same place for long periods of time, and
> (b) because the attacker can induce them to generate or receive traffic,
> in a way that's harder to reliably do to clients.

Yep. That's the fundamental problem.

> Most identification problems with Tor users, and with onion services,
> have turned out to be opsec mistakes, or flaws in the application
> software at one end or the other. That is, nothing to do with the Tor
> protocol at all. But of course in the "layers of conspiracy" world we
> live in nowadays, you can never be quite sure, because maybe "they"
> used a complex attack on Tor and then covered it up by pointing to an
> opsec flaw. One hopefully productive way forward is to point out that
> even if we don't know how every successful attack really started, we
> know that opsec flaws are sufficient to explain most of them.

I've looked at many of them, and I generally agree. The only exception
I'm sure of is relay early, which took down at least PlayPen, and ~1000
of its users, directly or indirectly. I'm not sorry about them, but we
don't know who else exploited it, against whom, or for how long.

> When I'm doing talks about Tor these days, I list these four areas
> of concern, ordered by how useful or usable they are to attackers in
> practice: (1) Opsec mistakes, (2) Browser metadata fingerprints / proxy
> bypass bugs, (3) Browser / webserver exploits, and (4) Traffic analysis.

There's also Freedom Hosting and Freedom Hosting II. Although I haven't
seen anything clear about how they were compromised, it seems arguable
(even obvious, in retrospect) that servers with numerous onion URLs are
far^N  more vulnerable. Not to say, doomed.

<SNIP>
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