Tor Deanonymization
February 4, 2020
DarkCyber noted “Deanonymizing Tor Circuits.” The write up may be useful to some wrestling with bot attacks using the Tor “network.” The comments to the post on Hacker News contain some useful information as well. These comments are at this link.
Several of the observations characterize the tone and content of the comment set:
- [On anonymity] “Tor is the only viable alternative and we know it can be at least seriously compromised by the bigger nations.”
- [On guard control] “There’s a second attack. The attacker can run one or more hostile guard nodes. If he can knock me off enough guards, my tor daemon will eventually choose one of his guards. Then he can identify my actual network address and directly attack my server.”
- [The problem] “Censorship is a political problem, technical solutions provide a temporary hot fix, but the political problem has to be solved at one point.”
- [Example of a block] “Operators of Internet sites have the ability to prevent traffic from Tor exit nodes or to offer reduced functionality for Tor users. … The BBC blocks the IP addresses of all known Tor guards and exit nodes from its iPlayer service, although relays and bridges are not blocked.”
Some HackerNews items can be difficult to locate via the site’s search utility. As a result, collecting Tor related information can be challenging.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2020
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