Tor, the pentagon's cyberweapon

[jim bell]

On Tuesday, October 13, 2020, 03:13:30 PM PDT, Stefan Claas <sac at 300baud.de> wrote: 

Karl wrote:

>> I'm burning out a bit so I want to add,
>> Please if you have better ideas of what _to_ do, suggest them.
>> Haven't read any proposals yet.


>An alternative to Tor could be the Nym Network, once in production.

>The Nym team is a good team and have well known researchers in the
field of anonymity.

>At least it is a project worth to follow, IMHO. I do run a mix-node
there myself and plan, once a bug issue is fixed, to run an additional
SphinxSocks Proxy server.

>https://nymtech.net/


Last year, I tried to start a discussion to implement a new anonymity router network, perhaps using the Raspberry Pi computers.   I got a quote for 500 Raspberry Pi's, at $70 each.  I included a few ideas, some old, some new:

1.    Routers could be anywhere, but would include homes and small businesses.  Anyone who has an Internet service with an adequately-large data cap. (Recently, I saw that CenturyLink had removed the data cap from some of its internet services. especially fiber.      https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/which-internet-service-providers-have-data-caps#:~:text=CenturyLink%20has%20a%201%20TB,you'll%20enjoy%20unlimited%20data.

 And their data caps, where they still exist, are 1 terabyte/month, which I think would be plenty for an anonymity network.  
 

2.    Extensive chaff.   (which, of course, is an old idea, strangely it's not yet implemented in TOR)

3.    "Output nodes" would output only in encrypted form, so that people generally could not get in trouble for acting as an output node:  Their output could be monitored, but not understood as to its content, since it would look like random data.  

4.    I also thought of an idea that such a network should implement multiple algorithms for networking, simultaneously, limited only by people's imaginations:   People  frequently talk about new ideas for anonymity networks, but how might they try them out in practice?   If an anonymity network is fated to have ONLY ONE routing method, then all new such methods cannot be easily developed:  You'd have to physically build a new network, along with all such associated costs, for each new routing method.  That's completely illogical.

   Should there be any limit to the number of kinds of routing done?  It's all software.   One advantage of this feature is that all these different routing algorithms are mixed together, such it should be harder to 

TOR is doubted for many good reasons, but if it is generally agreed that some form of anonymizing network is needed, then people should be willing to work to provide an alternative.

               Jim Bell





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