Anonymity Networks and Developer Determination

[Karl]

This email is shared from a place of forthrightness (and hope).

https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/37

Just to add, I suspect the reason that the state of public anonymity tools
is not stronger is that the existing international powerholders, whose
power could be reduced by widespread accessible anonymity, take diverse
action to slow the release and hinder the effective use of the research.

The way to make things change would be for people like us to agree to work
together on forging one right thing in a development community, and use
tools of both interpersonal mediation and software development to bring the
result to happen by force of collective determination. It might help if
everyone kept themselves more anonymous, collaborated in private as well as
in public, and supported people who ran into personal issues so as to
resist disruption and keep the work moving forward.


On Fri, Sep 4, 2020, 5:49 PM David Stainton <notifications at github.com>
wrote:

> It's too late for this discussion. IPFS has failed to embrace the concept
> of free Tor integration from volunteer developers.
>
> That having been said, anonymity is a synonym for traffic analysis
> resistance; that is to say, even encrypted traffic can be analyzed for the
> metadata it leaks. Tor is the very weakest of the existing designs for
> anonymous communication networks however it is the most widely used whereas
> the other designs from academia have not had much field testing; such as:
> mix networks, dcnets, verified shuffles and other things can be used to
> form anonymous communication networks such as private information
> retrieval, oblivious ram, multi party computation etc.
>
> Tor is trivially broken by any sufficient global adversary by means of
> timing correlation whereas mixnets are not. There are many other ways to
> break Tor.
>
> Anonymity aka traffic analysis resistance is not yet a popular security
> feature because these designs are in some respects ahead of their time...
> just like not every software project embraces deterministic builds. Just
> because your white middle class platitude doesn't allow you to understand
> why people in high risk situations might need these things doesn't mean
> they are not needed. In fact, in dealing with such folks I find the easiest
> way to impart the importance to them is to describe military scenarios,
> e.g. if you were in the military, overseas, you might actually be
> interested in traffic analysis resistance.
>
> Think about a future brighter than Tor! Think about mixnets, hybrid
> networks, dcnets and so on. Monoculture is death. Why is Tor the only
> successful anonymity network? And to a lesser degree I2p? Although the I2p
> observation is less valid because it's design is so similar to Tor in that
> it can easily be broken by timing correlation from a sufficiently global
> adversary.
>
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