Hot answers tagged tor
37
Tor uses a routing method called Onion routing. Much like an onion, each message (the core of the onion) is covered with layers of encryption.
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Your message is encrypted several times before it leaves your device. Node A can only decrypt (peel) the layer A, under which it would see the address of the next node. After the packet reaches the ...
27
TOR is better for you than it is for people in countries whose intelligence services run lots of TOR exit nodes and sniff the traffic. However, all you should assume when using TOR is that, if someone's not doing heavy statistical traffic analysis, they can't directly correlate your IP with the IP requesting resources at the server.
That leaves many, many ...
16
You would also need to be careful of the fact that your ISP is in a position to see that 'your IP address' is using Tor, even though it can't tell what you're using Tor for. If conditions are so hostile that you could be brought under suspicion simply for appearing to be clandestine, then you should take care to use Tor everwhere except on an Internet ...
15
Tor does not always protect your ip fully when you need to interact with the end node. You can check your efforts with online checks like this.
What has worked for me on every check I've tried is JanusVM. It runs as a VM, which you use as a proxy for your hardened browser VM. Janus uses Tor, squid, dns-proxy-tor, and privoxy to cover your ip. It is very ...
11
It does give you considerably more protection than browsing directly. There are some identified weaknesses which offer potential routes to attack your computer, however these can be mitigated using normal protection on your machine (ie patch/av up to date, run as unprivileged user etc) but the only real weakness in terms of compromising privacy seems to be ...
11
They know what are the TOR exit nodes addresses. So they just check your address and see if it matches with one of the exit nodes.
Exit nodes are known to the whole TOR network, if you decide to run one exit node, then you should advertise it right? Or else no one will use it. Then people will know your IP is a ToR exit node. Simple.
11
TOR uses the principle of onion routing. Let us say there are 3 TOR nodes A,B and C involved (selected randomly by client) and the message is m. We assume the corresponding public keys of these nodes to be Pa,Pb and Pc.
The message is repeatedly encrypted by the client starting with the public key of the exit node (Pc) followed by Pb and in the end Pa ...
10
Have you seen the Tor document on how a Tor Hidden Service works?
Essentially, in the same way that it's hard to find the source of traffic from a Tor exit node, it's hard to find the server operating a Tor Hidden Service. Authorities can't shut down the server, because they can't find out where it is.
The .onion TLD is not really a TLD (so there is no ...
10
No, because knowledge of the method is not enough to break it. You would also need to acquire information (e.g. Decryption keys), which simply cannot be obtained by an attacker.
The attacker can't figure out the source IP, or look at the data. Each Tor node only "knows" the source and destination of a block of data that it is handling. It can't open it to ...
10
Nope, the exit node can only decrypt the message and make the request, but he is not aware of where the original host is located, the only node that knows where the person is located is the second node. This is due to the layered encryption Tor uses. Every node only knows the next and previous hop, but not the whole path.
Nope because of 1
Nope because of 1
...
9
You should use a live cd like BackTrack. This comes with TOR and software for breaking WEP and WPA2-PSK. Then you can go war driving... are you old enough to drive?
Also brush up on your OSI model, the MAC address is only needed by the data link layer and is there for scrubbed off by whatever router you are behind. However, some routers log what MAC ...
9
I'll take a crack at explaining this without technical jargon.
Lets say you want to send a nasty letter to someone, but you'd rather not deliver the letter in person for fear that they might get angry with you.
You can ask a courier to take the letter from your house, and deliver it to the recipient, right? That works, but has the problem that the courier ...
9
In Tor, the user (you) chooses a random path through several nodes for its data. The first node in the path knows your IP address, but not what you send or where. The last node ("exit node") knows the target server address and sees the data (unless SSL is used, of course), but not your IP address. Every node in the path knows only the addresses of the ...
8
Legalities and ethics aside, the following could theoretically provide a reasonable level of anonymity:
A Live CD, e.g. one of the Linux variants
An internet connection not owned or traceable to you, e.g. an unsecured WiFi connection
An SSL VPN with an exit point in a country with laws to protect your information and purchased anonymously e.g. by mail ...
8
Shallot is an older program, there are newer alternatives available now:
Scallion - uses GPU hashing, needs .NET or Mono: http://github.com/lachesis/scallion
Eschalot - uses wordlist search, needs Unix or Linux: http://blacksunhq56imku.onion
Eschalot can find longer human-readable names like seedneedgoldcf6m.onion, hostbathdarkviph.onion, etc.
The ...
7
Blocking TOR at a network level is difficult, and anyone trying to do so will face a constant battle with the TOR developers. It's similar to the red queen effect between malware developers and AV researchers; every time an improved technique comes out to block TOR the developers will change the way it works.
I see TOR use as more of an endpoint control ...
6
In one line: they have a list of all the exit nodes.
more detailed:
I have seen this post demonstrates how to detect a Tor connection in php
function IsTorExitPoint(){
if (gethostbyname(ReverseIPOctets($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']).".".$_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'].".".ReverseIPOctets($_SERVER['SERVER_ADDR']).".ip-port.exitlist.torproject.org")=="127.0.0.2") {
...
6
The best simple description of the process can be found in the Tor Project's documentation. Here are the 5 parts of the connection:
The hidden service, running on a server somewhere with a Tor client.
Introduction points, which are Tor relays chosen by the hidden service.
The database of hidden service descriptors (each descriptor consists of the public ...
6
If I understand you correctly, your objective is to use Tor to increase the security of the communications channel between yourself and your web server?
Tor's main purpose is anonymity. It does not secure the communications channel between the exit node and the destination. Proper use of SSH (use a passphrase) should be more than adequate.
The only reason ...
6
Tor isn't safe from man-in-the-middle attacks.
The unsafe component are the Tor exit nodes. These make the actual, unencrypted request and therefore can read and modify your traffic. Tor provides anonymity by not letting them know where the request came from, but the actual traffic between the exit node and the Internet is not different from normal traffic, ...
6
Despite the fact these guys claimed to be 'anonymous', they were not actually anonymous and happily communicated in open environments (even if they were, for the most part, behind proxies etc). They all had handles associated with their identified. As a result, it was possible to slowly build up a profile and identify the suspects. One they correctly ...
6
Since you found my comment helpful, I'll just write it as an answer.
The concept is pretty simple. You bind your webserver to your localhost only, so it won't accept connections from outside your computer. Then you configure Tor to connect to this server. Since Tor is installed in your computer, it will be able to connect to your webserver, but others ...
5
I'm assuming you're using a domain name as a target in your application, e.g. google.com instead of 173.194.34.69. The DNS query is being done without the proxy.
The implementation of HttpWebRequest calls Dns.GetHostEntry, which uses the Winsock API (WSA) to perform a DNS query, outside of the proxy you specified. Unfortunately, this leaks the IP of the ...
5
You should consider how your browser profile looks to the web servers on the net. Check out https://panopticlick.eff.org/ for a test of just how unique your setup might be. If you turn out to be one in a million unique like many you will need to consider what you actually mean by anonymous in this case.
5
One problem with HTTPS is that you need to trust the root CA. And most browsers have many of those by default.
With TOR hidden services, the .onion address itself contains a hash of the server public key, so you don't need any CAs.
But the main issue is that .onion addresses aren't very user friendly. So the problem shifts to getting/verifying that you're ...
5
[Is there] a list of hardcoded entry servers with known public keys
Every server is capable of acting as an entry as every packet is either a packet to be forwarded or an exiting packet. This is achieved by encrypting each packet to a specific node. Each node has a public key listed which is used to negotiate a session key with that node.
The principle ...
5
It is possible. You have to edit your Tor config. Vidalia Control Canel > Settings > Advanced > Edit current torrc.
https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#ChooseEntryExit
You have to add:
ExitNodes {ua}
StrictNodes 1
"ua" is Ukrainian 2 letter country code. Be advised that bandwidth and latency over Tor are very poor.
5
You can use brute-force to find a key that partly match the hash you want. One tool for this is Shallot. The readme of Shallot says this about the security:
It is sometimes claimed that private keys generated by Shallot are less secure than those generated by Tor. This is false. Although Shallot generates a keypair with an unusually large public exponent ...
5
Performance sucks
It's better than a couple of years ago, but still not great.
Low latency anonymizers are prone to traffic analysis.
In particular if somebody can observe your traffic and your target's traffic, he can correlate that.
Anonymous remailers avoid this problem by adding longer delays, but use them for interactive applications, such as ...
5
SSH is very sensitive to latency, since every single key stroke implies a round-trip to the server. Doing SSH over a high-latency link is a recipe for high levels of frustrations. I already find more than 200 ms of latency unbearable after a few minutes of SSH -- with Tor, you'll get much more. That point alone will make you regret considering Tor several ...
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