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?
For sure, it 100% is
Completely unironically, everything on or connected to the internet is a honeypot or can be used as one
TOR is 100% compromised you cannot be ever 100% anonyme in the internet its impossible the corporations letting you use it and google, software and the hardware all are connected to the internet and the corporations and through that everything is compromised if you think apple (microsoft etc) and by extension the government have an acces to your phone do you think they cant read your emails even iff they cant talk about it publicly in court or something they can still read your emails and web history cia backed wreckers downvote smh
like i am dumb and don’t understand a lot about how tor works but i am pretty sure the kinda of people who understands and use it are usually privacy freaks so i would imagine someone would have exposed it if there was an obvious flaw in the code but i would imagine that with enough specific information like knowing the exact server and stuff they probably could do it
The encryption is probably not broken but the government can, and probably has:
The ability to detect tor traffic at the customer facing interface of an ISP, which would deanonymize tor traffic
The ability to buy thousands of tor nodes at under $100 a piece, including entry/exit nodes, and use aggregate data to determine the location and identity of webservers
The control of a lot of VPNs, which will log your usage of tor traffic
Any recommendations for VPNs? I’ve seen recommendations to make your own but that reduces to the problem of an anonymous host for it.
I don’t do anything fun over the Internet anymore so I don’t really use one. If the CIA starts guantanamoing chapo.chat users I guess I’m just fucked.
This isn’t really true. All they can tell is that there is tor traffic, and tor works to make it as indistinguishable from normal ssl traffic as possible, iirc.
They can tell that a specific household is using tor, which makes it not anonymous, I said that it doesn’t mean decryption. TOR traffic does not behave like SSL traffic.
If you are referring to this, it relies on being able to fingerprint the hidden service traffic by size and frequency of packets, which is easy for the hidden service to thwart, on top of needing to operate a large quantity of not only nodes, but specifically entry guard nodes, and the algorithm for choosing has been changed over the years to limit the impact of attacks like this.
I’m not referring to that, the whole point of security at the transportation (edit meant network layer) layer is pretty much pointless when the ends are compromised, and it is very cheap to do so.
If you’re doing VPN to Proxy to TOR or whatever then TOR isn’t what’s providing you security, you’re just using it to access TOR content.
And don’t forget the cooperation of every american ISP and probably a bunch of other NATO ISPs too. Long story short, if the US gov ever has a reason to target you specifically, maybe just don’t use the internet anymore
Long story short, if the US gov ever has a reason to target you specifically,
maybe just don’t use the internet anymoreyou’re probably screwed unless you are ready and able to physically defend yourself or just leave the country.
But if you want to avoid giving them a reason to target you, tor is very useful.
The U.S. Government would never do such a thing.
Hahahahahahahahahaha
