Re: [tor-bugs] #1880 [Core Tor/Tor]: Enhanced Security Suggestion

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#1880: Enhanced Security Suggestion
--------------------------+-------------------------------------
 Reporter:  forever       |          Owner:
     Type:  enhancement   |         Status:  reopened
 Priority:  Low           |      Milestone:  Tor: very long term
Component:  Core Tor/Tor  |        Version:
 Severity:  Major         |     Resolution:
 Keywords:  tor-relay     |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:                |         Points:
 Reviewer:                |        Sponsor:
--------------------------+-------------------------------------
Changes (by cypherpunks):

 * priority:  Medium => Low
 * status:  closed => reopened
 * resolution:  not a bug =>
 * severity:   => Major
 * milestone:   => Tor: very long term


Comment:

 In the last 7 years there has been much research on the subject.
 It is not a bug, but neither are any feature requests.
 It is a hope that the specifications will be improved, rather than the
 implementation.
 7 years ago only rich countries could passively break Tor using timing and
 size information, but now any script kiddie on your public hotspot, ISP,
 or carrier can do it. The most severe consequece of this is that brutal
 dictatorships such as Egypt and North Korea have started using the attacks
 to stalk journalists/whistleblowers and torture or murder them.
 Although the demands of the Internet have increased in the last 7 years,
 the infrastructure to support it has increased as well, as have the
 techniques for mitigating the negative effects of bad latency, and it is
 also easier than ever for data to be compressed more than ever before. Due
 to all of these advances, padding of latency and packet size should no
 longer require making the user experience awful.
 Obviously there will be arguments over how much padding there should be,
 and diminishing returns of greater padding.
 However, specifying that Tor shall have padding built in, and implementing
 some very small overhead by default (say, 0 to 1% extra latency and 0 to
 1% extra packet size) wouldn't hurt anything, it would break all the
 existing cyberweapons used to attack Tor users, and hopefully by the time
 all of those weapons are upgraded there will be a consensus on how much
 padding there should be. A lot of third world countries might never get
 such an upgrade, and first world ones are less likely to murder
 journalists.

 I've never written in a low level programming language so it's beyond me
 to even tell which of these studies will help to write the patch, but here
 are some studies;
 https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=traffic%20padding%20anonymity%20research
 https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=latency%20padding%20anonymity%20research
 https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=packet%20padding%20anonymity%20research
 https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=timing%20correlation%20anonymity%20research

--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/1880#comment:4>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online
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