From what I have read, one of the biggest problems with Tor is timing and traffic correlation attacks, and that these attacks cannot be easily mitigated because Tor aims to be low-latency. Tor claims that it cannot prevent analysis by a "global" adversary for this reason.
It seems to me that higher degrees of anonymity and security cannot be achieved without introducing more latency, as a sort of necessary cost.
Tor is described as an "overlay" network over the internet, which adds uncertainty about what network paths you take as you connect through the network. Would it be possible to create a secondary overlay network over the Tor network that would introduce additional noise to the timing and pattern of data flows? Possible routed and mixed by a network of onion services.
>>9518 Latency can always be measured between two known points, but latency cannot always be predicted. Especially, it is not always possible to measure the overall latency of one flow of data intentionally trying to obfuscate its latency.
I imagine a distributed system of nodes intentionally adding randomly determined latency to transmitted data, overlying the Tor network.
I hate low latency
normal fags have so small brains and attention they won't survive waiting 1 seconds for page load
>>9520 this might be not enough, because they can analyze data size
so not only latency needs to be randomized, but amount of data sent, some additional trash, then each onion strips some of it or adds more
>>9527 I believe there is some way that a system incorporating all these features could be built, to be used inside the Tor network. Just, a second layer of mixing that mixes other layers of connection metadata.
>>9520 >but latency cannot always be predicted
Wrong, you can make always make predictions about the latency. Your predictions may be wrong, but you can still make them.
>>9516 >1 minute latency or 10 minute latency -- the difference is nought.
I think what OP means is that instead of Tor nodes forwarding traffic as fast as they can they buffer it for a fixed amount of time and then forward traffic for multiple connections at the same time.
So instead of this, where an adversary can follow (A) and (B) because they go through the network at different times
Alice --(A)--> Tor1 --(A)--> Tor2
Bob --(B)--> Tor1 --(B)--> Tor2
You get this, where (A) and (B) are indistinguishable because they go from Tor1 to Tor2 at the same time.
Alice --(A)--> Tor1
Bob --(B)--> Tor1
Tor1 --(A,B)--> Tor2
Lookup mixnets and garlic routing to learn more.
As >>9527 says though, the reason Tor doesn't do this is because Tor is extremely mainstream now and everyone expects their cat videos to load in under a second.
What we need is raccoon routing.
In the unlikely event a hacker is able to gain access (very well hidden), their shit will get all fucked up by the angry raccoon.
>>9514 >It seems to me that higher degrees of anonymity and security cannot be achieved without introducing more latency, as a sort of necessary cost.
It doesn't matter, since web browsing which is the only shit anyone does with Tor is usually 0 latency (e.g if you use a proper implementation such as Freenet). Any higher amount of latency is because your shit is broken (such as webshit on a conceptual level).
>>9527 >normal fags have so small brains and attention they won't survive waiting 1 seconds for page load
So you're saying the only reason you use internet is to browse a few clickbait articles a day? I browse 100 articles (web/pdf) a day, so no, latency, or browser/pdf viewer freezing from high CPU usage is not acceptable.
>>9536 I am the OP. Yes, specifically I want to know if it would be feasible to create a new protocol that cryptographically obfuscates these other "metadatas" about internet communications, to be used within the already existing Tor network that currently only obfuscates the basics: your IP address.
>>9548 >So you're saying the only reason you use internet is to browse a few clickbait articles a day? I browse 100 articles (web/pdf) a day, so no, latency, or browser/pdf viewer freezing from high CPU usage is not acceptable.
I also read 100 articles per day and I don't give a fuck if they load after 1 or 10 seconds. I would prefer 10 seconds if it offered superior anonymity, but normal niggers won't accept this
but I think something like this >>9536 would work and be useful, even if Tor node only collects packets for short amount of time before routing them, like half or quarter second
not sure how would it affect its throughput though
>>9548 >use a proper implementation such as Freenet
If you read 100 "articles (web/pdf)" a day you should know that Freenet's
anonymity design is completely broken.
>Court records state that in the case of Paul Bradley Meagher, a University of
>Dakota police officer who was arrested for downloading child porn from
>Freenet, the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation had been running
>an undercover operation in the network since 2011, planting their own nodes
>in the P2P file sharing service.
http://www.hacker10.com/internet-anonymity/police-plants-own-computers-in-freenet-makes-arrest/
Freenet works by splitting up files into blocks and storing them across nodes.
To download a file your node sends out requests for those blocks. If your
neighbors don't have the blocks they ask their neighbors and their neighbors
ask their neighbors and so on. When the blocks come back to you, every node in
the path caches them. This is how popular files are spread around the network
and kept alive even if the original seed goes away. There is no encryption
because every node only acts on behalf of its neighbors. So in theory your
node doesn't know if the block you give me is for me or for one of my
neighbors. And likewise if I give you a block you don't know if it originally
came from me or from one of my neighbors.
The flaw here is that if too many of your neighbors are malicious, they can
correlate the blocks coming in and out of your node and figure out what files
you are sharing. i.e. if 70% of your neighbors are malicious and collectively
they see blocks making up 70% of a specific file then the odds are good you
are downloading the whole file for yourself and not merely passing a few
blocks on behalf of someone else.
https://github.com/freenet/wiki/wiki/Opennet-Attacks
Freenet punts on this issue with their "darknet" mode which is essentially
asking the user to figure out which nodes they trust before hand, making it as
useless as any other "friend-to-friend" network.
It seems to me that higher degrees of anonymity and security cannot be achieved without introducing more latency, as a sort of necessary cost.
Tor is described as an "overlay" network over the internet, which adds uncertainty about what network paths you take as you connect through the network. Would it be possible to create a secondary overlay network over the Tor network that would introduce additional noise to the timing and pattern of data flows? Possible routed and mixed by a network of onion services.