Question: Should You Trust Tor?

Question: Should You Trust Tor?

Jul 19, 2014 | Activism, News

nsa-tor-spying

Answer: Not if Your Life is at Stake

By Bill Blunden, July 16, 2014

In the ongoing drizzle of Snowden revelations the public has witnessed a litany of calls for the widespread adoption of online anonymity tools. One such technology is Tor, which employs a network of Internet relays to hinder the process of attribution. Though advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation openly claim that “Tor still works[1]” skepticism is warranted. In fact anyone risking incarceration (or worse) in the face of a highly leveraged intelligence outfit like the NSA would be ill- advised to put all of their eggs in the Tor basket. This is an unpleasant reality which certain privacy advocates have been soft-pedaling.

The NSA Wants You To Use Tor

Tor proponents often make a big deal of the fact that the NSA admits in its own internal documents that “Tor Stinks,” as it makes surveillance more work-intensive[2]. What these proponents fail to acknowledge is that the spies at the NSA also worry that Internet users will abandon Tor:

“[A] Critical mass of targets use Tor. Scaring them away from Tor might be counterproductive”

Go back and re-read that last sentence. Tor is a signal to spies, a big waving flag that gets their attention and literally draws them to your network traffic[3]. Certain aspects of Tor might “stink” but ultimately the NSA wants people to keep using Tor. This highlights the fact that security services, like the FBI[4], have developed sophisticated tools to remove the veil of anonymity that Tor aims to provide.

For example, the Washington Post reports[5]:

“One document provided by Snowden included an internal exchange among NSA hackers in which one of them said the agency’s Remote Operations Center was capable of targeting anyone who visited an al-Qaeda Web site using Tor.”

It’s well known that Tor is susceptible to what’s called a traffic confirmation attack (AKAend-to-end correlation), where an entity monitoring the network traffic on both sides of a Tor session can wield statistical tools to identify a specific communication path. Keep in mind that roughly 90 percent of the world’s internet communication flows through the United States[6], so it’s easy for U.S. intelligence to deploying this approach by watching data flows around entry and exit points[7].

Another method involves “staining” data with watermarks. For example, the NSA has been known to mark network traffic by purchasing ad space from online companies like Google. The ads cause web browsers to create a cookie artifact on the user’s computer which identifies the machine viewing the ad[8]. IP addresses may change but the cookie and its identifiers do not.

De-cloaking Tor users doesn’t necessarily require a federal budget either. According to a couple of researchers slated to speak at Black Hat in a few weeks[9]:

“In our analysis, we’ve discovered that a persistent adversary with a handful of powerful servers and a couple gigabit links can de-anonymize hundreds of thousands Tor clients and thousands of hidden services within a couple of months. The total investment cost? Just under $3,000.”

Client Network Exploitation (CNE) Trumps Crypto

Back in 2009 security researcher Joanna Rutkowska implemented what she dubbed the “Evil Maid” attack to foil TrueCrypt’s disk encryption scheme[10]. By compromising the Windows boot environment her team was able to capture the hard disk’s encryption passphrase and circumvent TrueCrypt’s protection. While users can [usually] defend against this sort of monkey business, by relying on a trusted boot process, the success of the Evil Maid attack underscores the capacity for subversion to trump encryption.

This type of client-side exploitation can be generalized for remote network-based operations. In a nutshell, it doesn’t matter how strong your network encryption is if a spy can somehow hack your computer and steal your encryption passphrase (to decrypt your traffic) or perhaps just pilfer the data that they want outright.

Enter the NSAs QUANTUM and FOXACID tag team. QUANTUM servers have the ability to mimic web sites and subsequently re-direct user requests to a second set of FOXACID servers which infects the user’s computer with malware[11]. Thanks to Ed Snowden it’s now public knowledge that the NSA’s goal is to industrialize this process of subversion (a system codenamed TURBINE[12]) so it can be executed on an industrial scale. Why go to the effort of decrypting Tor network traffic when spies can infect, infiltrate, and monitor millions of machine at a time?

Is it any wonder that the Kremlin has turned to old-school typewriters[13] and that German officials have actually considered a similar move[14]? In the absence of a faraday cage even tightly configured air- gapped systems can be breached using clever radio and cellular-based rootkits[15]. As one user shrewdly commented in an online post[16]:

“Ultimately, I believe in security. But what I believe about security leaves me far from the cutting edge; my security environment is more like bearskins and stone knives, because bearskins and stone knives are simple enough that I can *know* they won’t do something I don’t want them to do. Smartphones and computers simply cannot provide that guarantee. The parts of their security models that I do understand, *won’t* prevent any of the things I don’t want them to do.”

Software is hard to trust, there are literally thousands upon thousands of little nooks where a flaw can be “accidentally” inserted to provide a back door. Hardware is even worse.

Denouement

About a year ago John Young, the operator of the leaks site Cryptome, voiced serious concerns in a mailing list thread about the perception of security being conveyed by tools like Tor[17]:

“Security is deception. Comsec a trap. Natsec the mother of secfuckers”

Jacob Appelbaum, who by the way is intimately involved with the Tor project, responded:

“Whatever you’re smoking, I wish you’d share it with the group”

Appelbaum’s cavalier dismissal fails to appreciate the aforementioned countermeasures. What better way to harvest secrets from targets en mass than to undermine a ubiquitous technology that everyone thinks will keep them safe? Who’s holding the shit-bag now? For activists engaged in work that could get them executed, relying on crypto as a universal remedy is akin to buying snake oil. John Young’s stance may seem excessive to Tor promoters like Appelbaum but if Snowden’s revelations have taught us anything it’s that the cynical view has been spot on.

Bill Blunden is an independent investigator whose current areas of inquiry include information security, anti-forensics, and institutional analysis. He is the author of several books, including The Rootkit Arsenal and Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation, and the Malware-IndustrialComplex. Bill is the lead investigator at Below Gotham Labs.

End Notes

1 Cooper Quintin, “7 Things You Should Know About Tor,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, July 1, 2014, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/7-things-you-should-know-about-tor

2 ‘Tor Stinks’ presentation, Guardian, October 4, 2013,http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/04/tor-stinks-nsa-presentation-document

3 J. Appelbaum, A. Gibson, J. Goetz, V. Kabisch, L. Kampf, L. Ryge, “NSA targets theprivacy-conscious,” http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/aktuell/nsa230_page-1.html

4 Kevin Poulsen, “FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack,”

Wired, September 13, 2013, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/

5 Barton Gellman, Craig Timberg, and Steven Rich, “Secret NSA documents show campaign against Tor encrypted network,” Washington Post, October 4, 2013

6 James Ball, “NSA stores metadata of millions of web users for up to a year, secret files show,” Guardian, September 30, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/30/nsa-americans-metadata-year-documents/print

7 Maxim Kammerer, [tor-talk] End-to-end correlation for fun and profit, August 20, 2007,https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2012-August/025254.html

8 Seth Rosenblatt, “NSA tracks Google ads to find Tor users,” CNET, October 4, 2013, http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57606178-83/nsa-tracks-google-adsto-find-tor-users/

9 Alexander Volynkin & Michael McCord, “You Don’t Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a

Budget,” Black Hat USA 2014, https://www.blackhat.com/us-14/briefings.html#you-dont-have-to-be-the-nsa-to-break-tor-deanonymizing-users-on-a-budget

10 Joanna Rutkowska, “Evil Maid goes after TrueCrypt!” Invisible Things Lab’s Blog, October 16, 2009, http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2009/10/evil-maid-goes-after-truecrypt.html

11 Bruce Schneier, “Attacking Tor: how the NSA targets users’ online anonymity,” Guardian, October 4, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-nsa-users-online-anonymity/print

12 Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald, “How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware,”

Intercept, March 12, 2014, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/03/12/nsa-plans-infect-millions-computers-malware/

13 Chris Irvine, “Kremlin returns to typewriters to avoid computer leaks,” Telegraph, July 11, 2014,http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/10173645/Kremlin-returns-to-typewriters-to-avoid-computer-leaks.html

14 Cyrus Farivar, “In the name of security, German NSA committee may turn to typewriters,” Ars Technica, July 14, 2014, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/07/in-the-name-of-security-german-nsa-committee-may-turn-to-typewriters/

15 Jacob Appelbaum, “Shopping for Spy Gear: Catalog Advertises NSA Toolbox,” Der Spiegel, December 29, 2013, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-nsa-has-back-doors-for-numerous-devices-a-940994.html

16 “Iron Box Security,” Cryptome, June 6, 2014, http://cryptome.org/2014/06/iron-box-security.htm

17 “Natsec the Mother of Secfuckers,” Cryptome, June 9, 2013, http://cryptome.org/2013/06/nat-secfuckers.htm

The Other Sabu: A Hypothesis of Non-Compliance

The Other Sabu: A Hypothesis of Non-Compliance

May 27, 2014 | Anonymous, News

Sabu-informant-or-patsy

New York, NY – May 27th 2014

History was made today in a NYC courtroom with the extra-leniant sentencing of notorious Anonymous hacker turned FBI Informant ‘Sabu’ otherwise known as Hector Xavier Monsegur. But, what if things are not what they appear to be?

When considering history in hindsight, things were rarely what they seemed at the time. Cybersecurity drama and events should be held in similar regard, as the game of smoke and mirrors has never been more applicable than within the globally distributed Internet and its ‘security mechanisms’. Lets take a moment to consider the recent developments with this case and look at the sentencing from a different perspective.

Federal agents and LEAs accross the globe have been known to bend the rules, outright lie, or falsify evidence to suit their best interest. Not in pursuit of truth nor justice, but instead in pursuit of ‘winning’ at whatever cost. Another subject entirely, but it remains a fundamental pillar to this overall hypothesis.. What if Sabu never flipped, and [for reasons still unclear] they are only providing the illusion that he has?

Virtually everything known about how these ‘hacks’ unfolded has been described only by Court Documents and MSM/Fox News opinion of those documents. When considering that the messaging is one sided, it becomes even more interesting when observing how hard the MSM and FBI have pushed this message, which is that ‘Sabu turned informant on a dime’.

Judge Preska, being the wife of a hacked stratfor client, was arguably conflicted from start in Jeremy Hammond’s case, the individual who allegedly hacked Stratfor at behest of Sabu & the FBI. Today, this same judge not only provided a lenient sentence on Hector, but offered a public and glowing praise of the effectiveness of his efforts in subsequent critical takedowns. This is highly suspicious, as a ‘real’ thank you from a judge should be a sealed case, and witness protection. What the message actually sounded like was a backhanded compliment meaning ‘thanks for nothing, and good luck with the death threats’.

Love him or hate him, Sabu isn’t stupid. Certainly not, if he’s capable of doing all of these things the government claims he can do. In that assumption, one would allso assume he would outright demand protection, and probably future employment. What’s the point of flipping on multiple high value targets, if the end result is a publicly announced ‘time served’ with release back into a furious community, hated & minimum-wage forever? Finding a highly intelligent hacker that would agree to this, is incredibly unrealistic.

Taking an objective look at all the evidence, without bias, another theory can emerge. While it’s not much, there are historical Tweets and leaked IRC conversations to keep in mind, that may tell another side of the story. In a final Twitter posting, Sabu calls out the FBI for ‘being cowards, and not to give in’. Another post on the day before going dark, reminiscent of a yet-to-leak Snowden, Sabu describes invasive & illegal government spying, and hints that ‘informants & corporate compliance’ as the government’s only real tools. Some would just say he’s only playing the part. Others could say those tweets were a deliberate slap in the face, and evidence of non-compliance.

In those leaked IRC conversations, if believed are legitimate, outline some additional possibilities and variations to the actual events as we understand them.

http://cryptome.org/2014/05/sabu-m45t3rs4d0w8-2012-0330-0524.pdf

You’ll find that m45t3rs4d0w8 (aka Sanguinarious) brings up the false flag possibility, and they discuss the lies of FoxNews and how ‘anons believe anything’ and ‘dont ask the right questions’. Later in the leaked record, its discussed how the MSM lied about how he was caught. It should be noted that alledged LulSec accomplice, JoePie91 also believes there are inconsitencies with the Sabu story, and how he was nabbed, as documented on his blog March 10, 2012 shortly after Sabu’s public arrest.

http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2012/03/10/something-stinks-in-the-story-of-sabu/

In what could be most telling, m45t3rs4d0w8 not Sabu that then explains “regarding those things they ‘said’ you did” he noticed some court documentation doesnt make sense, has missing dates, and possibly falsified Witness and Defendant signatures. Sabu replies, “Good things to question, sadly no one is questioning like you are”.

Other final bits to mention would be Sabu’s talk of return. “I cant wait until i’m sentenced so i can finally get the truth out”, and his disgust of LEA/FBI manipulations, “they will go through your entire life… they will find a way to blackmail your a**. I’m not even ****ing exaggerating.”

Journalism requires critical thinking in order to truly get the message across. Proposed are critical unanswered questions:

Q. If Sabu is cooperating with such efficiency, why is gov’t hanging him out to dry?

No Witness Protection Offered nor Demanded?
No Sealed Case (to Protect the Informant)?

Anyone else in Sabu’s shoes would likely have said “OK, you got me, i’ll cooperate. But you’re going to seal this case, and give me witness protection. Otherwise the public will crucify me”.

Q. Is there a chance that Sabu was apprehended, but the FBI simply used his alias to entrap Hammond / Davis / Ackroyd/ etc by themselves?

What proof do we really have that Hector himself is responsible?

Q. Could the FBI have decided that publicly promoting Sabu as a crucial Anonymous Informant was a most effective way to ‘make the FBI look good’, whether true or not?

If Sabu had not flipped, do we believe the FBI would admit this failure?
Does the FBI have the will & means to falsify this into reality?

In conclusion, opinion should still be out on whether Hector Xavier Monesgur deserves the landslide of lambasting. It would be wise to dig deeper, withhold some bias (towards the incarcerated) and keep in mind…

“All warfare, is based on deception..” Sun Tzu

Who will be the first to interview Xavier, and ask these and likely more very important questions?

Max Maverick, Editor
DecryptedMatrix.com

[email protected]

 

 

 

 

EXHIBITS:

Playing the part? Or a slap in the face of federal pressure?

sabu-final-tweet

sabu-tweets-activism-anti-informant

 

 

False Flag op? Willing to cop to 12 charges?

sabu-chat-counts

 

 

Falsified Documents?

sabu-chat-stratfor

 

 

Sabu ready to speak the truth?  Feds lying about how they caught him?

sabu-chat-shells

 

 

Sabu disgusted by blackmail?

sabu-disgusted-by-blackmail

 

 

 

June 21, 2013 – Decrypted Matrix Radio: Monsanto Exec’s Nobel ‘Food’ Prize, UFO Drones, Video Game Terrorists, Guccifer on Cryptome, NSA Bitcoin Link?

Jun 21, 2013 | DCMX Radio

Monsanto Exec Gets ‘Nobel Peace Prize’ of Food

Video Game Casts Patriot Groups as Enemy Terrorists

New Advanced UFO-Like Drone Technologies Monitor Tens of Thousands of Protestors In Brazil

Conservation Director Warns ‘Unfounded Complaints About Water Supply Could Be Considered Terrorism Under Homeland Security

Next Phase of Syrian Invasion Begins — The Central Bank Connection

US Secret Service Visits Cryptome

World War Z: Emergency Preparedness, United Nations, and Predictive Programming

Is the National Security Agency behind Bitcoin?

Every Week Night 12-1am EST (9-10pm PST)

– Click Image to Listen LIVE –

<

Leak Site Directory

Leak Site Directory

May 15, 2012 | Activism

Contents

Whistle blower leaking Sites

Official and Community based sites that actively support whistle blowing / leaks about various topic

You can edit the wiki without having your ip address displayed by logging with the following Anonymous profile.

Username: Anonymous
Password: leaked

You may use that template in making leak site profiles:

 

WikiLeaks-Like Whistle blowing Sites

Leak Sites that publish leaks and accept submission of leaks, inspired by the original WikiLeaks.org concept.

New Concept Leak Sites

Different approaches and leaking methodologies

Established Leak Sites

Websites which have been publishing censored or leaked material before, or independently in parallel with WikiLeaks

Mainstream Media Whistle blowing Sites

Leak Sites that are operated by the media organizations directly

Environmental Protection Whistle blowing sites

Leak Sites and Organization that accept reporting about environmental issues

National Security or Serious Crime anonymous tip off / whistleblower sites

Tax Whistleblowing

Financial Whistle Blowing

Whistle Blowing for Censorship and Net Neutrality

Leak friendly websites

Websites which have a specific topic, audience and editorial position and as part of their reporting have frequently published high level unpublished documents

Public, USA FOIA and/or historical document release sites

Sites about whistleblowing and leaking

Leak Support Sites

Sites that support leaking in the editing and publishing processes, providing news, commentary or other stuff

Sites Commenting Leaks

Whistle Blowing Organizations

Organizations around the world that support Whistleblowing by promoting it as a transparency practice is public and private sector.

Whistle Blowing Consulting Businesses

Organization that do business related to WhistleBlowing and leaking (Consulting, Services, Press Agency middle men etc).

Whistle Blowing Hot Line Services

Charity and Profit organization that provide to public agencies and private corporation hotline services for whistleblowing in order to outsource the internal reporting service.

 

Whistle Blowing Software as a Service

The commercial services are typically known as Whistleblowing reporting systems, or anonymous internet reporting systems.

Whistle Blowing Software

Software used by public and private organization to manage whistleblowing sites (We need more free software!)

Open Source Whistleblowing Software

  • Honest Appalachia – Honest Appalachia website – uses Tor Hidden Service and PGP and publishes its own Open Source documents submission website software and configuration scripts to help other similar whistleblowing projects

Whistle Blowing in Corporations

A Directory of corporations that implemented corporate transparency by implementing whistleblowing through the organization:

Whistle Blowing Laws, Study and Regulations

A directory of laws, study, regulations and assessments on Whistle Blowing laws and practice in various countries.

Whistle Blowing Cases

Possibly Defunct/Dead websites

Encryption / Anonymity infrastructure services/ software used by some Whistleblower Sites

 

LeakDirectory related

Here misc stuff on Leak Directory initiative

Leak Directory backup wiki

A spam protected backup wiki mirror of this website is available at:

http://leakdirectory.wikispaces.com/

 

External opinions/reportage on LeakDirectory

http://britileaks.tumblr.com/post/15239051302/a-few-brief-notes-on-leakdirectory
https://p10.secure.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/ssl/ht4w/leakdirectoryorg-wiki.html

LeakDirectory workshop at 28C3 Chaos Computer Congress

There will be a workshop about the LeakDirectory project at the

28C3: Behind Enemy Lines
28th Chaos Communication Congress
December 27th to 30th, 2011
Berliner Congress Center, Berlin, Germany,

See http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/wiki/SocialHacking_LeakDirectory:

The Workshop has been glued together with GlobaLeaks one, you can download slides here

SocialHacking LeakDirectory Social Hacking

We will give an overview of what whistle blowing is and how it can be applied a wide array of different situations. Hopefully by the end of the workshop you will understand that whistle blowing is a fundamental tool for a democratic and transparent society.

We will focus in particular on the Leakdirectory Project, a shared crowd based initiative to represent most of the world of whistleblowing with the goal to became a reference for all the whistleblowing initiatives.

http://leakdirectory.org/index.php/Leak_Site_Directory
Secrets, As Described by John Young of Cryptome.org

Secrets, As Described by John Young of Cryptome.org

Jan 31, 2012 | Activism

To: “Whalen, Jeanne” <Jeanne.Whalen[at]wsj.com>
From: John Young <jya[at]pipeline.com>
Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2010 12:45 +0600
Subject: RE: from the WSJ

Jeanne,

Following up our telephone exchange on Friday:

1. You said the WSJ editor turned down the use of Rupert Murdoch’s
penthouse for an inteview because editorial and business are kept
separate and Murdoch is business. That is hoarily disingenuous for
no media keeps editorial and business separate, the two are
inseparable with business always in control.

2. I said there is no need for me to comment further on Wikileaks,
the story is now a churn of publicity stunts by Wikileaks, its
supporters and detractors.

3. You said there was interest in reporting on Cryptome in addition
to Wikileaks. I said that is another story, not related to Wikileaks.

To amplify 3, Cryptome shares with Wikileaks and many others
older and newer, the aim of reducing secrecy in government,
business, organizations, institutions and individuals.

Pervasive secrecy corrupts as an essential protector of those who
want control and manipulate the citzenry and subjects. Those who
advocate secrecy always justify it by claims of threats that require
secrecy to prevent or fight.

In truth, secrecy protects and empowers those who use it and
weakens those for whom it is invoked to protect.

Secrecy hides privilege, incompetence and deception of
those who depend on it and who would be disempowered
without it.

The very few legitimate uses of secrecy have served as the
seed for unjustified expanded and illegitimate uses.

A vast global enterprise of governments, institutions, organizations,
businesses and individuals dependent up the secrecy of abuse
of secrecy has evolved into an immensely valuable practice whose
cost to the public and benefits to its practitioners are concealed
by secrecy.

Secrecy has led to a very large undergournd criminal enterprise
dealing with stolen, forged, faked, and planted “secret” information
involving governments, businesses, NGOs, institutions and
individuals. Its value likely exceeds that of the drug trade, with
which it works in concert to hide assets, procedures and operators
that is keep the secrets in emulation of the secretkeepers.

Ex-secretkeepers are involved in this undergroung enterprise
as beneficiares, informants, facilitators of exchanges with
the agoveground secretkeepers and as spies for hire.

Secrecy is the single most threatening practice against democracy
and democratic procedures such that it is highly likely that there is
no democracy or democratic institutions unsullied by secrecy.

Secrecy poses the greatest threat to the United States because
it divides the poplulation into two groups, those with access to
secret information and those without. This asymmetrial access
to information vital to the United States as a democracy will
eventually turn it into an autocracy run by those with access
to secret informaton, protected by laws written to legitimate
this privileged access and to punish those who violate these
laws.

Those with access to secret information cannot honestly
partake in public discourse due to the requirement to lie
and dissumlate about what is secret information. They can
only speak to one another never in public. Similarly those
without access to secret information cannot fully
debate the issues which affect the nation, including
alleged threats promulagsted by secretkeepers who
are forbidden by law to disclose what they know.

Senator Patrick Moynihan, among others, has explored
the damaging consequences of excessive secrecy. Attempts
to debate these consequences have been suppressed
or distorted by secrecy practices and laws.

Efforts, governmental and private, to diminish secrecy
have had modest effects, and the amount of secret information
continues to grow virtually unchecked and concealed by
the very means questioned, secrecy itself.

These secrecy-reduction efforts are continually being attacked
by the secrets enterprise by secrecy-wielding oveseers, including
presidents, legislators and the courts.

While some of the privileged media challenge these practices,
most do not and thereby reinforce the unsavory.

It should not be surprising that this leads to an increase in
efforts to challenge secrecy practices by those excluded,
including such initiatives as, among many others around
the globe, Cryptome and Wikileaks.

Cryptome disagrees with the use of secrecy by Wikileaks
and its monetization of secret information which mimics
those it ostensibly opposes, say, Rupert Murdoch, among
untold others.

John

TOR Made for USG Open Source Spying Says Maker

TOR Made for USG Open Source Spying Says Maker

Jan 26, 2012 | Anonymous, Black Technology

Donate $25 for two DVDs of the Cryptome collection of files from June 1996 to the present

16 April 2011. A sends: Roger Dingledine writes that the US Navy uses Tor for open source spying:

http://idtrail.org/files/Dingledine%20-%20Tor.pdf

28 March 2011. Add comments from 1997 on TOR, called then the Onion Router.

25 March 2011. Add messages from A3 and JY.

24 March 2011. Add message from A and EFF.

 

22 March 2011

Creators of TOR:
David M. Goldschlag <goldschlag[at]itd.nrl.navy.mil>
Michael G. Reed <reed[at]itd.nrl.navy.mil>
Paul F. Syverson <syverson[at]itd.nrl.navy.mil>
Naval Research Laboratory

More:

http://www.onion-router.net/Publications/IH-1996.pdf
http://www.isoc.org/inet97/proceedings/F7/F7_1.HTM
http://www.onion-router.net/

 

TOR Made for USG Open Source Spying Says Maker

Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2011 16:57:39 -0400
From: Michael Reed <reed[at]inet.org>
To: tor-talk[at]lists.torproject.org
Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Iran cracks down on web dissident technology

On 03/22/2011 12:08 PM, Watson Ladd wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 11:23 AM, Joe Btfsplk<joebtfsplk[at]gmx.com>  wrote:
>> Why would any govt create something their enemies can easily use against
>> them, then continue funding it once they know it helps the enemy, if a govt
>> has absolutely no control over it?  It's that simple.  It would seem a very
>> bad idea.  Stop looking at it from a conspiracy standpoint&  consider it as
>> a common sense question.
> Because it helps the government as well. An anonymity network that
> only the US government uses is fairly useless. One that everyone uses
> is much more useful, and if your enemies use it as well that's very
> good, because then they can't cut off access without undoing their own
> work.

BINGO, we have a winner!  The original *QUESTION* posed that led to the
invention of Onion Routing was, "Can we build a system that allows for
bi-directional communications over the Internet where the source and
destination cannot be determined by a mid-point?"  The *PURPOSE* was for
DoD / Intelligence usage (open source intelligence gathering, covering
of forward deployed assets, whatever).  Not helping dissidents in
repressive countries.  Not assisting criminals in covering their
electronic tracks.  Not helping bit-torrent users avoid MPAA/RIAA
prosecution.  Not giving a 10 year old a way to bypass an anti-porn
filter.  Of course, we knew those would be other unavoidable uses for
the technology, but that was immaterial to the problem at hand we were
trying to solve (and if those uses were going to give us more cover
traffic to better hide what we wanted to use the network for, all the
better...I once told a flag officer that much to his chagrin).  I should
know, I was the recipient of that question from David, and Paul was
brought into the mix a few days later after I had sketched out a basic
(flawed) design for the original Onion Routing.

The short answer to your question of "Why would the government do this?"
is because it is in the best interests of some parts of the government
to have this capability...  Now enough of the conspiracy theories...

-Michael
_______________________________________________
tor-talk mailing list
tor-talk[at]lists.torproject.org
24 March 2011

A sends:

From: A
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2011 01:41:41 +0000
Subject: Cryptome Fwd: Re: Fwd: The onion TOR network
To: cryptome[at]earthlink.net
Following the publication of the email extract on TOR, I asked
the EFF what they made of it. Here it is. You can of course publish it.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rebecca Jeschke <rebecca[at]eff.org>
Date: 23 March 2011 21:29
Subject: Fwd: Re: Fwd: The onion TOR network
To: A
Hi A.  This is from Senior Staff Technologist Seth Schoen.  Thanks -- Rebecca
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Fwd: The onion TOR network
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 11:15:24 -0700
From: Seth David Schoen <schoen[at]eff.org>
To: Rebecca Jeschke <rebecca[at]eff.org>
CC: chris <chris[at]eff.org>, Peter Eckersley <pde[at]eff.org>,
    Seth Schoen <schoen[at]eff.org>
Rebecca Jeschke writes:

     any thoughts on this?
It's totally true that the military people who invented Tor were
thinking about how to create a system that would protect military communications.  The current iteration of that is described at 
https://www.torproject.org/about/torusers.html.en#military 
right on the Tor home page. 
However, the Tor developers also became clear early on that the system wouldn't protect military communications well unless it had a very diverse set of users.  Elsewhere in that same e-mail discussion, Mike Perry (a current Tor developer) alludes to this: 
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-March/019898.html 
  In fact, the best known way we have right now to improve anonymity   is to support more users, and more *types* of users. See: 
  http://www.freehaven.net/doc/wupss04/usability.pdf   http://freehaven.net/~arma/slides-weis06.pdf 
The first link is to a paper called "Anonymity Loves Company", which explains the issue this way: 
  No organization can build this infrastructure for its own sole use.   If a single corporation or government agency were to build a private   network to protect its operations, any connections entering or   leaving that network would be obviously linkable to the controlling   organization. The members and operations of that agency would be   easier, not harder, to distinguish. 
  Thus, to provide anonymity to any of its users, the network must   accept traffic from external users, so the various user groups can   blend together. 
You can read the entire (ongoing) discussion about government funding for Tor development via 
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-March/thread.html 
(search for "[tor-talk] Iran cracks down on web dissident technology"). 
-- 
Seth Schoen Senior Staff Technologist                         schoen[at]eff.org Electronic Frontier Foundation                    https://www.eff.org/ 454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA  94110     +1 415 436 9333 x107 
Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Iran cracks down on web dissident technology
From: A3
To: John Young <jya[at]pipeline.com>
Cc: A2, cypherpunks[at]al-qaeda.net

On Tue, 2011-03-22 at 17:43 -0400, John Young wrote:
> Fucking amazing admission. No conspiracy theory needed.

Wasn't this already very common knowledge?
Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Iran cracks down on web dissident technology
To: A3, A2, cypherpunks[at]al-qaeda.net
From: John Young <jya[at]pipeline.com>

That's what the Eff-folks advocating TOR are saying. And point to a
file on Torproject.org. See:

http://cryptome.org/0003/tor-spy.htm

However, this appears to be a giant evasion perhaps a subterfuge,
even reminds of what Big Boys say when customers learn they are
siphoning customer data. Read the privacy policy the lawyer-advised
apologists bark, and upon reading the privacy policy see that it only
emphasizes the subterfuge. Openly admitting siphoning is supposed
to make it okay because everyone does it under cover of lockstep
privacy policy. Reject that.

If the Tor operators really know what they are being used for, then
they should admit to being agents of the USG, as Michael Reed had
the guts to do.

Claiming this US spying role for Tor is well known is a crock of slop,
but then spies lie all the time and care not a whit that they peddle
shit for eaters of it. If you believe them and like what they do then
don't shilly-shally, just do what Michael Reed did but others are
too ashamed to do after having been duped since 1996.

If Reed's precedent for honesty is followed, there will be an
admission that the Internet was invented for spying by its inventor.
And then cryptography and other comsec tools. And then cellphones
and the like. Hold on now, this is getting out of hand, the apologists
will bellow, everybody has always known that there is no privacy
in digital world.

Actually, no, they did not. And those who knew keep their Janusian
mouths writhing to reap the rewards of deception. Now that is a truth
everyone knows. No conspiracy theory needed.
http://cryptome.org/jya/onion.htm25 April 1997: Add Lucky Green’s comments.
3 March 1997 (Thanks to LG for pointer)

Date: Sun, 02 Mar 1997 18:20:49 -0800
To: cryptography[at]c2.net, coderpunks[at]toad.com, weidai[at]eskimo.com
From: Lucky Green <shamrock[at]netcom.com>
Subject: PipeNet implemented?

At the FC’97 rump session, Paul Syverson from NRL presented a paper titled “Onion Routing”. The description of the system sounds very much like Wei Dai’s PipeNet. However, the development team seems to be unaware of PipeNet and the discussions about it that we had in the past.

NLR has currently five machines implementing the protocol. Connection setup time is claimed to be 500 ms. They are looking for volunteers to run “Onion Routers”. It appears the US military wants to access websites without giving away the fact that they are accessing the sites and is looking to us to provide the cover traffic. What a fortunate situation.

They said that the source would soon be on the web page, but so far it has not appeared.

http://www.itd.nrl.navy.mil/ITD/5540/projects/onion-routing/

 

To: cypherpunks[at]cyberpass.net
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 1997 01:24:29 -0700
From: Lucky Green <shamrock[at]netcom.com>
Subject: Re: A new system for anonymity on the web

At 12:59 PM 4/20/97 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:

>Hal,
>
>What do you think of the “onion routing” approach from the group at Naval
>Postgraduate? How would compare it to this newest proposal?

Neither one of them is any good in its present form. The folks at the FC’97 rump session got to watch Jim and myself poke truck sized holes into the NRL design within seconds of them ending their presentation. :-)

Here was a US military research lab presenting a system they thought would give them a way to surf the Net anonymously by using the public for cover traffic. [Let me just spell out here that I believe that the people from NRL and Cypherpunks are on the same side on this issue. Their concern is COMSEC, not SIGINT.]

Anyway, we knew how to crack their system without even having to think about it, since folks on Cypherpunks, especially Wei Dai, had discovered various venues of attack on such systems long ago. Cypherpunks are teaching the military about traffic analysis. :-)

The one good thing about NRL is that they seem to be willing to learn. [The other being that they get paid to write our code for us.] Though I get the distinct feeling that they don’t like the required solution. There is simply no way to harden the system against attack without using a constant or at least slowly varying (I would guess we are talking about periods of several hours here, certainly not minutes, but I haven’t done the math, nor do I have the time to do so) bandwidth data stream between the end user and the first Onion Router. This will invariably require special software on the end user’s machine. I think the best design would be a client side proxy. [That much Crowds got right.]

As to Crowds, they got to be kidding. How many end users are willing to become, even without their direct knowledge, the last hop to <enter evil URL here>? I believe that relatively few users would want their IP address to be the one showing up in the server log of <enter seized machine’s name here> because their jondo happened to be the exit point chosen.

 

 

— Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock[at]netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred

“I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.” Mahatma Gandhi

http://cryptome.org/0003/tor-spy.htm