Tor Stinks re Traffic Analysis and Sybil (as do other networks)

[jamesd at echeque.com]

On 2019-11-26 05:11, Jim bell wrote:
>   I'm convinced there are too many security issues for high privacy communication over networks that eventually utilize or terminate on commercial facilities. Only specially designed, ptp, wireless comms using OTP or other trusted keying, combined with appropriate tradecraft are likely to be effective against nation state resources. Recall WW IIs wireless warriors.'


The best thing you can do to hide metadata data over the network is to 
make sure that video data is sent in a format that is indistinguishable 
to the eavesdropper on any single link from data being sent in a manner 
that hides who is talking to whom.

If you are implementing a mesh network, you have to know where in the 
mesh you are sending data to.

In the simple and direct way of implementing a mesh network, done with 
efficiency rather than secrecy in mind, every signal gets sent from 
nearest node to nearest node, which means the sender has to know the 
geographic location of the recipient in the mesh and a map of 
intermediaries, which which means the location of the parties is widely 
known, that everyone knows the location of an entity, but watching the 
network does not provide much metadata on which party is talking to 
which party.  You get close to onion routing for almost free.  And you 
can further hide the traffic by choosing a zig zag path and the sender 
onion encrypting to each relay, full onion routing, and by having random 
delays on the link - which means that full onion routing should a field 
for time sensitivity, that you need to have an interface to the network 
which supports leisurely interaction, an email like interface. If the 
network provides fast efficient traffic, the noisy bursts from people 
using the network to send data in the most direct and fastest way to the 
destination hide who is talking to whom using leisurely data slowly 
going an indirect route.

Slow and small amounts of data will be hidden by people downloading 
gigabytes of video by the fastest and most direct route.