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Re: [tor-talk] Please Remove Tor bridge and... from Censorship countries.
You said the governments can see a user bandwidth usage and it is so bad because they can understand a user use Tor for regular web surfing or use it for upload files and...
You said governments can see users usages but not contents but how they can find specific users if Tor hide my IP?!!!!!!
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On Sat, 11/5/16, Seth David Schoen <schoen@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Please Remove Tor bridge and... from Censorship countries.
To: tor-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Saturday, November 5, 2016, 11:36 PM
Jason Long writes:
> Hello Tor Developers and administrator.The
Tor goal is provide Secure web surfing as free and Freedom
but unfortunately some countries like Iran, China, North
Korea and... Launch Tor bridges for spying on users and
sniff their traffics and it is so bad and decrease Tor users
and security. If Tor Project goal is Freedom and Anti
Censorship then it must ban all bridges and Servers from
those countries. Please consider it and do a serious
job.
Tor's
approach to this issue is generally to look for
ever-greater
geographic diversity of
servers.
The Tor design
assumes that there could be monitoring of servers in a
particular network, but hopes that this
won't be a big problem because
most
organizations monitoring Tor nodes can only see a part of
the
overall network. In that case, they
can hopefully only see a part of
the path
that a particular user's traffic takes, so they may not
know
where the user is and also whom the
user is communicating with (though
they
might know one or the other).
In this model, it's not necessarily bad to
have nodes on networks that
are hostile --
because the people doing the monitoring get incomplete
information. At the same time, having nodes
in many places can decrease
how complete a
picture any one network operator or government can get.
For example, suppose that the U.S. government,
the Chinese government,
and the Iranian
government are all trying to spy on Tor users whose
traffic passes through their territory, but the
governments don't directly
cooperate
with each other. In that case, having a user use nodes in
all
3 jurisdictions is probably great for
anonymity because each jurisdiction
to some
extent protects facts about the user's activity from the
other
jurisdictions, and it's hard for
anyone to put the whole picture together.
If people want to hide the
fact that they're using Tor at all, and are
using bridges for that reason, they probably
should not use bridges
inside their own
country. But those bridges could be useful to people
in other countries who aren't trying to
hide from the same adversary.
If an exit node is unable to reach a lot of
network resources because
of censorship on
the network where it's located, it should be possible
to detect this through scanning and flag it as
a BadExit so that clients
will avoid using
it in that role.
There's still a problem when network
operators pool their information or
when
governments can monitor networks outside of their own
territory.
This is a practical problem for
path selection and also for assessing
how
much privacy Tor can actually provide against a particular
adversary.
For instance, if the U.K.
government taps enough of the world's Internet
links, or trades data about Tor users with
other governments, it might
be able to learn
a lot about a high fraction of Tor users even if they
don't use nodes that are in the U.K. That
could be hard to fix without
adopting a
different anonymity design or finding a way to prevent
these
taps and exchanges of data.
People have been thinking
about that kind of issue quite a bit, like in
https://www.nrl.navy.mil/itd/chacs/biblio/users-get-routed-traffic-correlation-tor-realistic-adversaries
and other research projects,
and to my mind the news isn't necessarily
that good. But the key point is that having
nodes on an unfriendly
network isn't
necessarily bad in itself unless that network actually
sees interesting data as a result (or actively
disrupts traffic in a way
that doesn't
get blacklisted from clients' path selection). And
that can
sometimes happen, but doesn't
always have to happen, and people on other
networks can still get a potential privacy or
anticensorship benefit in
the meantime.
Notice that this argument
doesn't depend on saying that what governments
are doing is OK, or that they don't have
ill will toward the Tor network
or
particular Tor users. It also doesn't prove that
governments will
fail to monitor the
network; there's a lot of uncertainty about how
effective governments' capabilities in this
area are.
Finally,
there's an issue about identifying which nodes are
secretly
run by the same organizations (or
secretly monitored by the same
organizations!) which fail to admit it. This
is a form of Sybil attack,
where one entity
pretends to be many different entities. If a government
set up many ostensibly unrelated nodes, and
clients believed they were
actually
unrelated, it would increase the chance that a given Tor
user
used several of those nodes for the
same circuit, decreasing anonymity.
Tor can
probably do better about detecting this. It's not
certain that
blacklisting countries would
help much with this, because we don't know
which governments are attempting this to what
degrees, and because they
don't have to
host their nodes on IP addresses in their own
jurisdiction!
If the North Korean government
wants to do this sort of attack, it can
pay
to set up a bunch of servers in France and Germany, which
users and
their Tor clients would think are
"French" or "German" but which are
effectively North Korean for surveillance
purposes.
--
Seth Schoen <schoen@xxxxxxx>
Senior Staff Technologist
https://www.eff.org/
Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://www.eff.org/join
815 Eddy Street, San Francisco, CA 94109
+1 415 436 9333 x107
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