this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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Lots of rumors, very little evidence.
There's a lot of really bad stuff on Tor. Like, really bad; probably worse than you're imagining. Things that make the old rotten.com stuff look like a child's birthday party. If Tor was actually compromised, the people creating and uploading that stuff would be grabbed quickly. Instead, LEAs have to cooperate globally and run long-con sting operations in order to identify people in order to bust them. Most of the time, they're busting people that use Tor due to social engineering or one kind or another, and the remaining times it's because someone fucked up configuration on a site.
If everyone gets busted all at once (2022-2024 market takedowns is as close to that as it could come IMO) then everyone immediately stops using tor and starts using i2p or freenet or whatever system they may not have broken yet. That's baaahd for business, said the wolf in sheep's clothing.
Although they did run a cp site for months before shutting it down, so they're clearly not opposed to the long-game, especially if it involves national security (it does.)
Freenet was never really anonymous; there have definitely been busts from Freenet. IIRC it's distributed, but not anonymized; I haven't really done anything with it in ten years or so. i2p is probably pretty solid, but it's often very difficult to use. I've tried it, and most of the time couldn't make configurations work. Or else the eep sites I was trying to reach were offline. IDK.
I dunno; given that Tor was originally designed to be extremely difficult to track, and was designed by spooks, it's plausible that they aren't able to crack their own security. If they controlled enough of the network, they could, in theory, track individual users. But it would be extremely resource intensive, and they would already have to be targeting you.
IIRC, the case you're talking about involved social engineering to gain admin privileges, then illegally hacking computers through malicious javascript to leak their real IP. IIRC a huge number of the cases ended up getting thrown out because there was no way they could legally do what they did, and the convictions they did get were ones that they would have been able to get without the illegal hacking. That was, what, something like ten years ago? Around the time that The Silk Road got taken down? (That was taken down because the site owner used the same username both on the Silk Road and on a clearnet site; he essentially doxxed himself.)
What I'm talking about wrt tor is traffic shaping or node DoS leading to a Sybil attack. When the (state)actor has the ability to drop all packets from you to NON attacker-controlled guard nodes, and then once you're connected to a dirty guard, drop all connections to non-controlled relay and exit nodes, it's done. There's also an ongoing DoS attack that is able to make any guard/entry/relay/exit use 100% CPU making them unusable and it's been going on for months now. You can see it on the tor forums (relay-operators) and someone posted about it in more detail on the monero subreddit the other day.
Oh, yeah, I've been seeing that a lot of it has been really dragging for, like, the last year or so.
Yes, if a state-level actor is able to get control of all the nodes, then everyone is pretty much fucked. I suppose that, with enough nodes, you could make that kind of attack really, really hard. I'm also guessing that Monero transactions are taking a really long time right now to go through? I saw that the Finnish (?) gov't claimed to have 'broken' Monero, but they're not giving any technical information about their claims, and most current speculation is that they busted the guy doing other shit that they were able to trace link to Monero transactions. (I don't really keep up with Monero; last I knew, there wasn't a good wallet that didn't require downloading the whole blockchain, and my home internet is slooooooooooooow.)
It's not even a matter of gaining control of nodes, they can simply blackhole your access to good nodes so you end up with nodes controlled by them. Easy but loud, although it seems to be what's going on in a number of cases, and not many people are talking about it. Tor used to alert you to this, but now it's quietly tucked away into a log file. There are other vulnerabilities present in tor and the tor project devs don't seem particularly interested in them, with the DoS attacks requiring the community itself to step in with hacky solutions. I'm of the mind (never would have found myself saying this) that the tor project at large is compromised.
Monero is currently being hit by a (likely) black marble attack which is why it's so slow. They're basically flooding transactions (1/3 to 2/3 of all transactions able to be processed at any given time) so that the anonymity that makes monero work is severely degraded. Whether it breaks past transactions remains to be seen, but it absolutely weakens the anonymity of transactions done during (possibly shortly before and after) the attacks.