Subject: Re: distributed traffic patterns (for personal traffic) From: teddks@gmail.com To: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2010 09:07:47 -0500
On Mon, 2010-11-08 at 05:15 +0000, John Case wrote:
Virtual Private Servers are getting fairly cheap, and Amazon EC2 instances even cheaper. A hundred or so dollars per month could put together a fairly large set (say, five ?) of general purpose unix nodes on at least 3 continents ... EC2 in Asia and Ireland, and then some bullshit VPS provider(s) here and there in the US.
So let's say you assemble a little quiver of these root shells, and your intention is to completely obfuscate your own personal traffic ... to just disappear completely (as an atomic, individual net user).
The technical foundation is pretty basic - just set up your own system, or perhaps a firewall at your home/office to block all traffic except for SSH or HTTPS and to take all outbound traffic and tunnel it over one of those to a random one of your systems. Easy.
So where does this start to fall apart ?
First, if you hit any kind of personal/vanity/small sites on a daily or hourly basis, **an attacker just has to camp out upstream from there and collect all the source IPs that come in.** So if you run your own mailserver (or whatever), this falls apart almost immediately.
Second, unencrypted login sessions ... between web forums and chat rooms and any number of other things, somewhere you're entering a user/pass over plain old HTTP... and if an attacker can guess one or more sites that they know you visit, they can, just like above, camp out upstream and just collect all of your proxy IPs. ... And it looks like this is a fairly cheap thing to put together in 2010...
It seems to me like Tor would do everything this solution would do, and even would avoid the two attacks you present. The attacker can do the same thing (camp the destination), but they'll just get Tor exits. It's also simple to transparently proxy all traffic on your system through Tor.
If you really wanted to limit your anonymity set, you could run those nodes and set a few of them up as bridge nodes and a few of them up as exits, and cycle through that. An upcoming feature of Tor is matching circuits to destination ports, so you could use your (trusted) exits for cleartext traffic (the few sites when you're forced onto HTTP) and use the wider Tor network for the rest.
Maybe I'm not seeing what you're trying to get at, but it seems like this would do everything you need.
[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc] Some people don't wish to use Tor for a variety of reasons, whether a lack of trust, or simply because they don't want anyone to see Tor traffic on their connection. I see what you're saying, mind you. Perhaps even better would be to combine the two, and run Tor from some Asian/off-shore server you own which you tunnel into. Either or, Tor is better simply because it eliminates the upstream camping, which would probably be the main problem; eventually, your proxy servers would be enumerated, and then, you'd be vulnerable. There's the cost, too. 100 dollars a month, which would need to be reasonably anonymously transferred, otherwise someone already has a list of your shells. This kind of method would work against someone who has limited resources, but then, so does vanilla Tor, or simple proxy chaining.