I’ve heard a lot of people on the left argue that Tor is likely backdoored because it was created by the U.S. Navy for spies to communicate and is still funded by the government. Yasha Levine has written a lot about this:
- https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/tor-files
- https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-crypto-keepers-levine
He also appeared in TrueAnon episode 50 to talk about this.
On the other hand, a lot of people in the crypto and tech community disagree with this. They believe that Tor is not backdoored for one or both of the following reasons:
- Tor is open-source and has been audited.
- The U.S. Government would never do such a thing.
They also point to a leaked NSA presentation from 2007 that admits the NSA can’t deanonymize Tor users.
What are your thoughts?
To my knowledge they have their techniques to deanonymize people, in a targeted manner, but at its core I don’t believe the protocol is backdoored.
Yeah, if I remember correctly, when the feds took down the Silk Road dude they basically had to hack a server inside the TOR network to serve exploit code that forced the browser to bypass the TOR network. There was a couple of months where everyone was freaking out because there was a sudden influx of people complaining that they were unexpectedly making unsecured requests to some server in langley or something like that.
I’m not even sure if it was a hacked server… I seem to remember them busting a hosting provider popular for TOR servers on the claim of child pornography and then suddenly all the servers owned by that provider began serving up dodgy code.
javascript exploits
To expand upon this, interested parties should look up “canvas fingerprinting.” JS HTML5 contains within it certain functions that a server can use to query information about your system, setup, and display (such as resolution of the window loading the resources, custom fonts being displayed by the system, etc.), and if your setup is weird/unique enough, it can form a “fingerprint” of your oddities which can be used to track you across the web. This is why TOR’s instructions tell you not to resize the window. If everyone runs the TOR browser at the default resolution, that is one less oddity that can be used to track individuals.
It’s not so much that they have to get into “a server inside the tor network” but they can go after users of tor hidden services if they somehow track down the server hosting that particular hidden service, but the whole system is built around making that very difficult.
Yes! Hidden services was what I was talking about. It’s been a while. :grinning face with sweat:
Those links you posted were what I was talking about. I know they claimed to have gotten the Silk Road dude over him using the same username, but I remember at the time (along with the timeline of the hack) that it all stank of parallel construction so they wouldn’t have to admit to the hack.
