This attack has been known for years now. And tor is simply not able to defend against it without a complete redesign.
The potential for timing attacks has been known since the beginning of Tor. In other words, more than a decade. But that doesn’t mean you can’t defend against it. One way to defend against it is by having more nodes. Another way is to write clients that take into account the potential for timing attacks. Both of these were specifically mentioned in the article.
Based on what was in the article and what’s in the history books, I’m not sure how to interpret your comment in a constructive way. Is there anything more specific you meant, that isn’t contradicted by what’s in the article?
First, randomize your mac, shutdown anything that can “dial home” (updates, sync, logged in apps, etc) then connect to internet then anonymous VPN, then connect to the tor network, use an anonymized browser with NO java enabled, never download anything -copy paste text, and screen cap images-, if your network drops the popo’s are trying to do a “reconnect” attack to see if they can get an unprotected connection to the material you were looking at. Use a livedisk on USB and you likely won’t get bios level attacks, as live disks make it harder to access your bios. Source: a boring ass individual that just wants the gov off their jock strap, suck it Joe my FBI agent, you know what you did.
This looks like it was a timing analysis attack. Basically, they’re trying to figure out which user did something specific. They match the timing of the event with the traffic from the user, and now they know which user did the thing.
It can be fuzzed by streaming something at the same time, because now your traffic is way harder to time analyze when you have a semi-constant stream of data running. But streaming something over Tor is an exercise in patience, (and it’s not something the typical user will just always have running in the background) so timing analysis attacks are gaining popularity.
The TOR network itself is safe - at least assuming the TLAs don’t control at least half of the nodes, which is far from impossible. But let’s assume…
The weak point comes from the browser: that’s how the fuzz deanonymizes users. The only safe browser to use on TOR is the TOR browser, and that’s the problem: it disables so many unsafe functionalities that it’s essentially unusable on a lot of websites. So people use regular browsers over TOR, the browser leaks identifying data and that’s how they get caught.
My understanding is that Tor Browser works fine, there’s just some dumb website owners that block Tor traffic by IP address.
Do you think it’s better to use a VPN if you aren’t using TOR Browser?
All VPNs do is change who has your browsing data: your ISP or the VPN operator. You may or may not trust either of them not to keep records, in either case you have no way of verifying this.
