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

[Peter Fairbrother]

On 23/11/2019 17:00, Punk-Stasi 2.0 wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Nov 2019 03:21:08 -0500
> grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>
>>> low-latency
>>
>> This phrase is misused by many as if it were some kind
>> of litmus test for determining TA resistance... it is not.
> 
> 	by 'low latency' they mean two things :

No, neither of those. Low latency simply means messages get delivered 
quickly - in practice for web browsing this means a user gets a 
(subsequent) response within 4 or 5 seconds, though less than 1 second 
is better.

Initially that timing was a guess, but since then there have been 
several papers which conclude that if web response time is consistently 
longer than 4-5 seconds then people will give up and seek a faster 
response by eg using different software. After 1 second you begin to 
lose your train of thought. After 4-5 you get bored. There is another 
threshold of boredom at about 10-12 seconds.


Eighth law: a system which is hard to use will be abused or unused.


The Tor rationale for requiring low latency was to make it more 
user-friendly and also thereby increase (innocent) traffic. 
Unfortunately that came at the cost of easier traffic analysis, as only 
the traffic passed within the last 4-5 seconds need be considered. They 
tried to balance that out - more traffic plus greater usability vs 
easier analysis - and came up with a system which had some 
perhaps-useful properties.

However, resistance against traffic analysis by The Man was not one of 
those properties.

And for that exact reason I agree, Tor stinks.

Most if not all of the initial devs would have liked it to be, but that 
wasn't possible.  Roger Dingledene did the initial brainstorming with 
the informal help of much of the then privacy/anonymity crypto 
community, including Paul. Nick Matthewson was then roped in as the main 
code writer.

It was quickly realised that Tor - like any low-latency web onion router 
- could not defeat The Man, at which point many of the community dropped 
out or declined to be associated with it.


And scum-master syverson

At the time of Tor's inception (and afaik still) Paul primarily 
identified as US Navy.

I don't know whether Paul would have worked on a public system which was 
impervious to NSA and USN - but the question never arose. Tor would be 
good enough to defeat third-world governments, which was both his and 
Tor's stated goal, and Tor could never defeat The Man.


openly acknowledges it...in papers that no-one reads, while advertising 
tor as a means to
> 
> 	"Defend yourself against network surveillance and traffic analysis."

Is that a quote from Paul? It doesn't sound like the chap I knew. Who 
wasn't a scum-master, except perhaps to the swabbies?

Heck, Roger and Nick were wanna-be-heroes.




Peter Fairbrother