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Armed agents seize records of reporter, Washington Times prepares legal action
by Eugen Leitl 28 Oct '13

28 Oct '13

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/25/armed-agents-seize-records-… Armed agents seize records of reporter, Washington Times prepares legal action ** FILE ** Associated Press** FILE ** Associated Press By Guy Taylor-The Washington Times Friday, October 25, 2013 The Washington Times Maryland state police and federal agents used a search warrant in an unrelated criminal investigation to seize the private reporting files of an award-winning former investigative journalist for The Washington Times who had exposed problems in the Homeland Security Department's Federal Air Marshal Service. Reporter Audrey Hudson said the investigators, who included an agent for Homeland's Coast Guard service, took her private notes and government documents that she had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act during a predawn raid of her family home on Aug. 6. SEE ALSO: Judicial Watch sues IRS for stonewalling on tea party FOIA The documents, some which chronicled her sources and her work at the Times about problems inside the Homeland Security Department, were seized under a warrant to search for unregistered firearms and a “potato gun” suspected of belonging to her husband, Paul Flanagan, a Coast Guard employee. Mr. Flanagan has not been charged with any wrongdoing since the raid. The warrant, obtained by the Times, offered no specific permission to seize reporting notes or files. The Washington Times said Friday it is preparing legal action to fight what it called an unwarranted intrusion on the First Amendment. “While we appreciate law enforcement’s right to investigate legitimate concerns, there is no reason for agents to use an unrelated gun case to seize the First Amendment protected materials of a reporter,” Times Editor John Solomon said. “This violates the very premise of a free press, and it raises additional concerns when one of the seizing agencies was a frequent target of the reporter’s work. “Homeland’s conduct in seizing privileged reporters notes and Freedom of Information Act documents raises serious Fourth Amendment issues, and our lawyers are preparing an appropriate legal response,” he said. Maryland State Police declined comment, except to say that “evidence and information developed during this investigation is currently under review by both the Anne Arundel County State's Attorney's Office and the United State's Attorney's Office,” and that a determination has yet to be made on any charges. PHOTOS: Families suspect SEAL Team 6 crash was inside job The U.S. Coast Guard confirmed it seized and reviewed Ms. Hudson’s documents but insisted it did nothing wrong. Capt. Tony Hahn, a spokesman at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, said the Coast Guard Investigative Service (CGIS) was involved in the case because Mrs. Hudson’s husband, Mr. Flanagan, is a Coast Guard employee. During the search of the home, said Capt. Hahn, “the CGIS agent discovered government documents labeled ‘FOUO’ — For Official Use Only and ‘LES’ — Law Enforcement Sensitive.” “The files that contained these documents were cataloged on the search warrant inventory and taken from the premises,” he said. “The documents were reviewed with the source agency and determined to be obtained properly through the Freedom of Information Act.” Ms. Hudson described a harrowing ordeal the morning her family home was raided. The agents, who had arrived a 4:30 a.m. in full body armor, collected several small arms during the raid, although no charges have been filed against Mr. Flanagan, 54, during the nearly three months since. Mrs. Hudson, 50, says that while the authorities were raiding her house, Coast Guard investigator Miguel Bosch — who formerly worked at the marshal service — began asking questions about whether she was the same “Audrey Hudson” who had written “the air marshal stories” for The Washington Times. Mrs. Hudson says she responded that she was. It was not until roughly a month later, Mrs. Hudson says, that she realized the agents had quietly seized five files from her private office — including handwritten and typed notes from interviews with numerous confidential sources related to her exclusive reporting on the air marshals service. The search warrant for the raid, issued to Maryland State Trooper Victor Hodgin by a district court judge, made no reference to the documents. A copy obtained by The Times indicates that the search was to be narrowly focused on the pursuit of “firearms” and their “accessories and/or parts,” as well as any communications that that might be found in Mrs. Hudson and Mrs. Flanagan’s home related to “the acquisition of firearms or accessories.” David W. Fischer, a private attorney contacted by the couple, says that the raid is a potential violation of Mrs. Hudson’s constitutional rights. “Obviously, the warrant is about a gun, nothing about reporters notes,” he said. “It would be a blatant constitutional violation to take that stuff if the search warrant didn’t specifically say so.” “This is a situation where they picked very specifically through her stuff and took documents that the Coast Guard, or the Department of Homeland Security, would be very interested in,” he added. The raid could constitute illegal search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment — and the fact that the materials were related to her work as a reporter could First Amendment freedom of the press protections. Once the documents had been “cleared,” Homeland decided to return the documents to Mr. Flanagan and Mrs. Hudson, Capt. Hahn said. The Coast Guard, like the Federal Air Marshal Service is an agency within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. A Reporter’s Word What concerns Mrs. Hudson and The Times is the fact that private reporting documents were seized during the search being conducted on totally unrelated grounds. While Mr. Flanagan has a police record from the mid-1980s related to the unlawful possession of firearms, including automatic weapons, Mrs. Hudson fears her private documents may have been the real target of the search. “They tore my office apart more than any other room in my house,” she said, adding agents did not take other potentially non-TSA-related documents from the office. “I had a box full of [Department of Defense] notes,” she said. “They didn’t touch those.” Some of the files included notes that she had used to expose how the Federal Air Marshal Service had lied to Congress during the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks about the number of airline flights that the service was actually protecting against another terrorist attack. A story written by Mrs. Hudson for The Times in March 2005, revealed how air marshals were protecting less than 10 percent of domestic and international flights during the month of December 2004, and that the number of flights Homeland Security officials were providing to Congress was higher than the actual number of marshals it employed. Mrs. Hudson says that the experience of having “a half-dozen armed officers rifle through my personal belongings for the three-hour search was traumatizing.” “But when the files were returned to me and I saw all the notes that had been in their possession for a month, it was gut-wrenching,” she said. That her private files were seized, says Mrs. Hudson, is particularly disturbing because of interactions that she and her husband had during the search of their home, as well as months afterwards, with Coast Guard investigator Miguel Bosch. According to his profile on the networking site LinkedIn, Mr. Bosch worked at the Federal Air Marshal Service from April 2001 through November 2007. It was Mr. Bosch, Mrs. Hudson says, who asked her during the Aug. 6 search if she was the same Audrey Hudson who had written the air marshal stories. It was also Mr. Bosch, she says, who phoned Mr. Flanagan a month later to say that documents taken during the search had been cleared. During the call, according Mrs. Hudson, Mr. Bosch said the files had been taken to make sure that they contained only “FOIA-able” information and that he had circulated them to the Transportation Security Administration, which oversees the Federal Air Marshal Service, in order to verify that “it was legitimate” for her to possess such information. “Essentially, the files that included the identities of numerous government whistleblowers were turned over to the same government agency and officials who they were exposing for wrongdoing,” Mrs. Hudson said. Reached on the telephone by a reporter for The Times, Mr. Bosch refused to comment on whether or not journalist-related documents were seized during the search of Mrs. Hudson’s home. “I got to get on the phone with Coast Guard legal before I talk with you,” Mr. Bosch said. “It’s still an open investigation.” Asked specifically whether documents related to Mrs. Hudson’s reporting activities were taken during the search, he responded: “There was a lot of stuff taken.” Legitimate Case? The U.S. Coast Guard maintains that it has done nothing wrong in the case and that the investigation into Mrs. Hudson’s husband is based on legitimate suspicion that he was illegally in possession of firearms. The warrant outlines how Mr. Flanagan was found guilty in 1985 — when he was 25 — of resisting arrest in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The charge of carrying a concealed deadly weapon was dropped, but a year later, the U.S. Marshal Service arrested Mr. Flanagan for possession of a machine gun. The warrant also indicates that Mr. Flanagan was also arrested in 1996 by police in Anne Arundel County, Maryland,for possessing a handgun in his vehicle. The warrant outlines how sometime this year Mr. Flanagan drew the interest of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives after allegedly attempting to purchase “possible machine gun parts from a Swedish national.” The warrant says the information was handed to the Coast Guard’s investigative service — since Mr. Flanagan worked at the agency — which conducted an interview during which “Flanagan was evasive but stated he did receive a ‘potato gun’ but it was defective and it was thrown away.” The term “potato gun” is “slang used during the illegal importation of silencers,” according to the warrant. Mrs. Hudson says the “potato gun” claim is outrageous. She says that her husband did in fact purchase a “potato launcher” from an online company based in Sweden five years ago as a novelty item, but it was discarded within as few weeks because it did not work. She noted that the law enforcement agents who raided her home did not take a “golf ball launcher” that also belonged to her husband as a novelty item. They did, however, confiscate small arms belonging to Mrs. Hudson that she had legally registered with the Maryland State Police as far back as 2005. The search warrant allowed for the weapons to be confiscated, and Mrs. Hudson says the agents told her that because her husband had pled guilty to a resisting arrest charge nearly 30 years ago, she was not allowed to possess the guns under state law. The guns she owned were for recreational shooting, she says, as well as for security concerns resulting from many of her investigations. “I swear to God, we’re not smuggling machine gun parts from Sweden,” said Mrs. Hudson, adding that the potato launcher in question “didn’t even work.” Mrs. Hudson has been a reporter in Washington, D.C. for nearly 15 years, and covered Homeland Security for the Times after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks through December 2009. Her investigations have sparked numerous congressional investigations that led to laws signed by former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. She has won numerous journalism awards for her investigations, including the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi bronze medal for public service, the Society of Professional Journalists Dateline Award in Investigative Reporting, and was nominated twice by The Times for the Pulitzer Prize. “Protecting confidential sources is a part of my honor and hits me at my ethical core,” said Mrs. Hudson. “To have someone steal my source information and know it could impact people’s careers, is disgusting, a massive overreach. This kind of conduct is intimidation clearly aimed at silencing a vigorous press.” Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/25/armed-agents-seize-records-… Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

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Another Snowden News Story. Another Lesson in Proper Whistleblowing.
by coderman 28 Oct '13

28 Oct '13

[ED.: given some states pursuing severe charges for merely reporting this information, it seems not entirely disingenuous to position ones self in positive light] --- http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/another-snowden-news-story-another… """ Among the many things I have grown to detest about the Snowden Leaks spectacle is that for every heavily redacted page that’s been revealed — a meagre ~300 pages in five months according to Cryptome.org — we rubes seem to get at least twenty, sometimes very stern, lessons in proper whistleblowing from the the Leaker, the Leak Keepers, the Leak Keeper inner circle, and soldiers in the sycophant army that doltishly parrot and hype everything these people say. The lesson is as follows: 1. Don’t ever just dump your leaks on the internet. 2. Make sure your leaks are properly vetted and mediated by proper mainstream journalists. This lesson is often, perhaps even usually, stated as, or with, some variation of the following: Don’t be like Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks, that is, indiscriminate, reckless and dangerous to both national security and human life... """

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TS crypto disclosure
by brian carroll 28 Oct '13

28 Oct '13

perusing the NSA Borders of Cryptology diagram¹ from long ago i kept thinking-- something all pervasive in culture is missing here.... and lo and behold i uncover an undocumented secret military program based both in encoded sound and electromagnetic data transmission, and now i feel it is time to blow the whistle in the public interest::: COVERT OPERATIONS - UNDOCUMENTED CRYPTO PROGRAM https://www.dropbox.com/s/glcoyi4m4p5864f/top_secret_program.gif [modified diagram, attached. fair use of copyright] ¹ http://cryptome.org/2013/09/nsa-cryptology-borders.pdf

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[guardian-dev] Perception of cryptography being to complicated to use...
by Kai Krueger 28 Oct '13

28 Oct '13

Hello everyone, you have likely all heard about the scandal regard the NSA listening in on calls of various heads of states, particularly that of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone. What ever your opinion might be regarding the issue of bugging phones of friendly partner nations politician and whether you may consider it as "normal and everyone does it" or "unheard of", there seems to be another dimension to the scandal that I think might be of interest to this list. Although I don't think there are yet enough information publicly available to say what actually happened and what phones exactly were effected, but all indications appear to point to that it wasn't the Chancellors highly secured official government phone, but a private party phone that she uses all the time. Again, I am not aware of details yet of how that phone was secured, but media reports appear to suggest it might have been a standard smartphone using entirely unsecured plain phone lines and text messaging. So despite the German government spending 10s of millions of Euros to develop and purchase highly secure phones, it appears many of the ministers aren't actually using them. Indeed, the German secretary of commerce (Philip Roesler) was supposedly quoted as saying "Everyone knows that we are using our private phones, despite it being illegal" [my own translation from an indirect quote in German]. The media have so far mostly given as explanations for this astounding ignorance towards the risks of data security amongst politicians to be due to the "complicated and tedious procedures" involved in using cryptographically secured communications channels. The media are writing about how terribly complicated and inconvenient using secure phones are and I have read claims that e.g. the security features add latency of up to 1s or more and one has to "learn how to speak correctly to overcome such high latencies". Furthermore, because secure phones are so expensive (several 1000s of Euro's per phone), "no one" has them and because obviously both communications partners need them, secure phones are "close to useless". None of these claims and news articles are likely to help get more people to secure their electronic communication. Unfortunately, I haven't seen the main stream media ever talk about some of the great software out there like that of the guardian project, and that e.g. using CSipSimple or Jitsi via ostel to get an encrypted phone call is actually really pretty simple. Or how TextSecure or ChatSecure allow to use encrypted messaging with very little additional overhead. Do people know if there are efforts underway to try and counter this general impression of "cryptography is too hard and cumbersome to use"? And try and convince the media to report more positively about the available tools to secure ones communication? Are there other ways to influence public opinion that cryptography isn't that difficult to use and it is worthwhile doing? And that thanks to various opensource projects there are various high quality, standards compliant / inter-operable solutions available at no extra cost? Kai _______________________________________________ Guardian-dev mailing list Post: Guardian-dev(a)lists.mayfirst.org List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/guardian-dev To Unsubscribe Send email to: Guardian-dev-unsubscribe(a)lists.mayfirst.org Or visit: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/options/guardian-dev/eugen%40leitl.org You are subscribed as: eugen(a)leitl.org

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hide & seek (url)
by brian carroll 28 Oct '13

28 Oct '13

(potentially lots of relevance here to security issues, esp perhaps mimicry, limits or parameters, insecurity via looped evaluation of shared technique...) 1-Trick Chameleon: Predators Learn to See Through Camouflage // via digg http://nautil.us/blog/1_trick-chameleon-predators-learn-to-see-through-camo… "...the researchers found that it took their participants longest to spot the [prey] when they were using disruptive coloration rather than the other strategies, and that was especially true when the pattern was of high contrast. However, as the [preys’] contrast levels increased above the level of the background, they became easier to spot. In the middle was an ideal contrast level."

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[tor-talk] x.509 for hidden services
by Gregory Maxwell 28 Oct '13

28 Oct '13

==Background== (you can skip to the Tor section if you don't care) The Bitcoin universe is in the process of creating a specification for digital invoices called "the bitcoin payment protocol". (More info: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=300809.msg3225143#msg3225143) The payment protocol allows someone to request someone else pay Bitcoin for specific things, instructing them to pay specific amounts in specific ways, and allows the receiver to provide things like instructions for sending a refund if the transaction is for some reason aborted... all sorts of extra metadata which doesn't belong in the public Bitcoin network for scalability and privacy reasons. One of the things these invoices have is an optional signing mechanism for authentication and non-repudiation. Normally these requests would be sent over an authenticated and encrypted channel which provides confidentiality and authentication, but not non-repudiation. The non-repudiation will provide cryptographic evidence to the participants which can be used to resolve disputes: e.g. "He didn't send me my alpaca socks!" "Thats not the address I told you to pay!" "He told me he'd send my 99 red-balloons, not just one!" "No way, that was the price for 1 red-balloon!" The payment protocol is extensible and may someday commonly support many kinds of signatures, but the initial implementations only support signing with internal x.509 certificates and verifying those certificates with standard CAs. As _horrible_ as this is, it's better than nothing, and the primary users asking for this functionality have SSL websites today. We don't believe that any other PKI mechenism is actually functional enough to be usable (e.g. as evidenced by the fact that downloads of our GPG signatures, is on the order of 1% of the downloads of the Bitcoin software; and probably only a small portion of those users have actually done anything to verify the signing keys) today, so other options haven't been a priority. However, the need to use the known insecure CA infrastructure for this (optional!) feature has seriously spazzed out some people. A lot of this is pure confusion, e.g. people thinking that all payment requests would have to go via the CA (no kidding!), but its surprisingly hard to convince people who are responding emotionally of the subtle tradeoffs involved especially when they have the luxury of saying "it's your problem to go figure out, figure it out and go write a bunch extra of software for me". So having some alternative on day one would be useful in helping the more conspiracy minded understand that this isn't some effort to cram the use of CAs down their throat. ==Where Tor comes in== One of the downsides if using x.509 certs to non-repudiate here is that sites hosted as tor hidden services can't participate. It occurred to me that this could be fixed with very little code: Take the HS pubkey, pack it into a self-signed x.509 cert with the cn=pubkeybase32.onion. And specify that .onion certs have a special hostname validation rule that hashes and encodes the key. Then the whole process would work for .onion, we'd have a non-CA option available and working, etc. I'm aware that HS pubkeys have been used for application level authentication in Tor elsewhere (e.g. I believe torchat does this) so it's not entirely unprecedented. I'm not aware of anyone packing them in x.509 certificates. If anyone has, I'd like to use the same encoding style for greater compatibility. The biggest reason I can see not to do this is that it will not be compatible with future editions of hidden services which aren't based on RSA keys. (e.g. the EC point addition stuff to protect against enumeration attacks wouldn't fit into this model). I don't think this is a serious concern: if HS x.509s do become widely used we could add a new authentication type for the new onion addresses when those are introduced. Does anyone else see any other reasons not to do this? Are there other applications which would benefit from having x.509 certs for onion names? -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk

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[liberationtech] A Public Statement Regarding Ubiquitous Encryption on the XMPP Network
by Moritz Bartl 28 Oct '13

28 Oct '13

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [jdev] TLS Everywhere Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 21:23:08 -0600 From: Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter(a)stpeter.im> Reply-To: Jabber/XMPP software development list <jdev(a)jabber.org> To: jdev(a)jabber.org Almost 15 years have passed since my friend Jeremie Miller released the initial version of the jabberd IM server, launching the Jabber open-source community and the technology we know today as XMPP. Yet, all that time, hop-by-hop encryption using SSL/TLS has been optional on the XMPP network. A number of server operators and software developers in the XMPP community have decided that needs to change for the better. Based on discussions at the XMPP Summit last week in Portland, Oregon, I have drafted a plan for upgrading the XMPP network to always-on, mandatory, ubiquitous encryption. You can find it here: https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto In short: we owe it to those who use XMPP technologies to improve the security of the network (and thanks to Thijs Alkemade, we now have better ways to test such security, using the newly-launched "IM Observatory" at xmpp.net) Although we know that channel encryption is not the complete answer, it's the right thing to do because it will help to protect people's communications from prying eyes. If you or your organization develop XMPP-compatible software or run a service that's connected to the XMPP network, I encourage you to sign the statement by following the instructions in the README at the URL shown above. Thanks! Peter _______________________________________________ JDev mailing list Info: http://mail.jabber.org/mailman/listinfo/jdev Unsubscribe: JDev-unsubscribe(a)jabber.org _______________________________________________ -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu.

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Re: [Cryptography] BitMessage?
by Keyfur 28 Oct '13

28 Oct '13

That would get extremely bulky in mass-adoption, in both local storage and network usage. Currently they have some structure to create tiered "streams", but that still doesn't eliminate the excessive network burden, it just saves some disk space. The streams work in a hierarchy, with the uppermost assuming the highest network burden. Because it's necessary to send an acknowledgement message, a complete circuit must established (though not all at once) between nodes. Also "broadcast messages" seem too risky to me. They're liable to be abused and cause a DoS if this protocol is adopted on a large-scale. Proof-of-work doesn't protect broadcast message abuse, because an attacker could just use a small botnet to generate a bunch of untransmitted messages with similar timestamps for a future date. Once that date arrives, then the attacker could just submit a very large batch of valid broadcast bitmessages. I can't think of a solution to either of these problems right now, but I otherwise think Bitmessage is a great idea. It's current, humbly sized userbase makes for comfortable testing. https://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf James On 25 October 2013 01:41, Russ Nelson <nelson(a)crynwr.com> wrote: > I haven't seen any discussion of BitMessage (http://bitmessage.org) > here yet. The idea is to be a mixer with a pool of recipients, which > currently seems to be 12,000ish. Before anybody will receive your > message, they need to see a proof of work. Once they do, they forward > the message to everyone else, using a flood-fill algorithm. Messages > are encrypted so only the recipient can decode them. Mailing lists are > simulated via a shared private key. > > It looks plausible. Not obviously snake oil. > > -- > --my blog is at http://blog.russnelson.com > Crynwr supports open source software > 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315-600-8815 > Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | Sheepdog > _______________________________________________ > The cryptography mailing list > cryptography(a)metzdowd.com > http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography > _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

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Re: [Freedombox-discuss] Dumb idea: Alternative to Tor that promotes good behavior
by Daniel Kahn Gillmor 28 Oct '13

28 Oct '13

On 10/27/2013 01:26 PM, Bill Cox wrote: > Here's the problem: Tor has little public support, because most Tor > traffic is wasted on supporting bad behavior. I don't think that's the main reason Tor has little public support. I think Tor has little public support because using Tor is slower and less convenient than not using Tor, and people (at least in the USA) seem to value convenience above most other things. > Here's my solution: Build a Tor-like network for routing anonymous data, > but track behavior of all users' secret identities, and make their > Internet history public. Allow node operators to choose categories of > public identities they which to support. This would not be anonymous data. You're asking people to publish their full internet histories for the privilege of being able to use the network. Are you aware of the work being done toward de-anonymization of rich data sets? I think many people's web browsing habits alone would be sufficient to discover their physical identity with relatively high certainty. Even if we were to assume that the data was not possible to tie back to someone's physical location to put them in harm's way, if their network use patterns are how they do their activism, then publishing their network use patterns provides an adversary with a lot of information that is very helpful to disrupt this same activity (e.g. "Which web sites do they usually use to distribute their [tools|analysis|incitements]? Which chat channels do they frequent? Where/how do they get their e-mail? Can we destroy or subvert those services?) > For example, I would choose to promote all forms of non-violent free > speech. I should be able to contribute my bandwidth to this purpose. > If a dissident in China goes by the public ID of ChinaCat, and has a > high reputation for promoting freedom, they are welcome to use my > bandwidth. If someone just wants access to redtube.com, they can get > that access from someone else. If you prefer this, then you should personally make arrangements with ChinaCat directly. I'm not convinced that you could ever make such an arrangement scale cleanly without gross oversimplifications that wouldn't meet many people's assumptions about what the terms mean. Is a sit-in at a restaurant "non-violent free speech"? What about a work stoppage at a factory? how about when the workers barricade the factory against its owners? What about people who sabotage or destroy machinery in their factory? What about destruction of machinery that is prepared to destroy desparately needed housing stock? What about people who smash the windows of low-wage corporate franchises? What about smashing the windows and doors of fire-prone sweatshops? Are all of these things non-violent free speech? can you imagine that someone else might have a different answer for any of them than you do? > There are various technical aspects to this idea. For example, would > prefer that the social graph between secret identities be public so I > can use a simple network flow algorithm over trust edges between > identities to determine how much I trust someone. I think it would be worthwhile to spec out such an algorithm, and then think through the spec under a handful of real-world use cases. what does it mean to do "network flow over trust edges"? What specifically does "trust" mean in this context? Can you give an example of how that would let you automatically determine how much you trust someone? What does that kind of automated trust discovery mean from a human perspective? What are the ways it could be exploited by an adversary intent on causing trouble? sorry to be a pessimist, but i'm not convinced this is an effective or even desirable framework. --dkg _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list Freedombox-discuss(a)lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss

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Re: [tor-relays] Filtering TOR Non-exit Relay - Just Curious
by Zack Weinberg 27 Oct '13

27 Oct '13

Lukas Erlacher <l.erlacher(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> Middle nodes don't know the type of traffic. If they have any way >> to find out, that is a bug that needs to be fixed. End-of. Packet timing analysis may be able to tell you *something* -- this is part of my current research project, ask again in six months :-) Mr. Nelson Laurenti wrote: > I didn't say I knew the type of traffic on my relay, that would be an > entirely new set of problems; I said I can see the IP addresses > coming in and going out, and the ports used. That's to be expected. Tor is still using IP, so there is no way around the fact that a relay operator can observe the IP addresses of hosts in direct communication with their relay(s). If your relay is acting strictly as a middle hop, however, the IP addresses you observe should all be the addresses of other Tor relays, and none of the traffic you observe should *originate* from the IP addresses you observe. If you are an entry hop, some of the traffic you observe will be traffic coming directly from clients, and you can learn their IP addresses and probably quite a bit about them. This is part of why we have guards. (I am skeptical about guards actually being a good idea, but that's *also* part of my group's research, so, again, ask again in six months.) Only if you are an exit node should you be able to observe any traffic that is in cleartext and/or coming directly from server hosts. It is possible for one Tor process to serve all three roles simultaneously, but never (by design) for a single circuit. The design intent is that it will be prohibitively difficult for any single operator to control more than one node in a circuit more than some tiny fraction of the time; how feasible this actually is in real life has been the subject of quite a bit of research already (and, yep, my group is looking at that as well, albeit not as centrally). zw _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays

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