On 10/22/2015 01:46 PM, Juan wrote:
On Wed, 21 Oct 2015 01:37:54 -0600 Mirimir <mirimir@riseup.net> wrote:
On 10/21/2015 12:09 AM, Juan wrote:
Tor is open-source, and collaborative. Arguably, anyone with requisite skills and resources can subvert it. But it is true that the Five Eyes have the best resources for traffic analysis.
That's the thing. So maybe 'subvert' wasn't the best choice of word here, but the idea is that if you take into account anglo-american surveillance, then tor doesn't perform as advertised.
The Tor Project doesn't claim that Tor protects against targeted attack by global adversaries. I could go on at length. But instead, please see <https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/adversaries-and-anonymity-systems-the-basics>.
Using passive analysis they can undermine the tor network without actually 'subverting' a single coma in the code.
(plus, they prolly can make analysis more efficient by tampering with traffic, again without touching the code)
I don't doubt that.
And frankly, do you think the US military would shoot themselves in the foot by creating something that 'aids' 'terrorists' and that they can't subvert? There's no reason for them to do that so it's safe to conclude that they didn't do it.
It's hard to say. Only idiots use tools with backdoors.
That really depends on the nature of the backdoor. It's certainly risky to backdoor something, but it's less risky if the people who create the backdoor (say the nsa) are the same and only people who have the resources to access it. And the 'backdoor' may be simply a less-than-ideal system...like tor.
It's possible.
Freenet is truly p2p (unlike tor), the storage is decentralized (unlike tor) and the developers don't get millions of dollars from the pentagon (as far as I know).
Well, adversaries can use malicious P2P nodes. It's true that Freenet is about the same size as Tor (http://www.asksteved.com/stats/ vs https://metrics.torproject.org/networksize.html). But with Tor, what's relevant is the number of possible circuits. With ~1700 entry guards, ~1000 exit relays and ~2300 non-entry/non-exit relays, about four billion distinct circuits are possible.
But faster relays are used more frequently no?
Anyway, my point was that as far as publishing documents go freenet looks like a a better and more serious design than tor.
Maybe, but different goals. Me, I like Dissent. See Feigenbaum and Ford (2015) Seeking Anonymity in an Internet Panopticon. Communications of the ACM 58:10, 58-69. Preprint at <http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5307>. <SNIP>