On October 04, 2013 Edward Snowden leaked a new classified NSA document “TOR Stinks”.

What is TOR?

Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. TOR can be used in research projects (as we are using to measure censorship across various countries. Or can be used by attackers/ terrorists to hide their identity.)

NSA wants to see the users of TOR, monitor the traffic etc. As the TOR nodes are spread across the whole world, it is really hard for them to trace down everyone. But they used 3 main ideas to achieve their goal.

1. Tracking cookies of users
2. Vulnerabilities from Firefox browser
3. Running own hostile (spying) TOR nodes

Even though above ideas sound nice, they cannot solve the problems as this works on a very small fraction of TOR users.  They have their own spying nodes, but those are very few and hence the success rate is limited.

The above limitations led them to think in another direction. They thought of “Exploitation Strategy”. The strategy mainly makes the use of TOR worse and eventually it will refrain the users from using TOR.  One of the strategy is adding TOR nodes that will respond very slowly. Users will be annoyed by the experience and will stop using TOR. Although this is an evil idea, but I think this can prove effective for them to minimize the number of TOR users.

References:

https://www.torproject.org/

http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/04/tor-stinks-nsa-presentation-document

http://thehackernews.com/2013/10/nsa-using-browser-cookies-to-track-tor.html

Tags: TOR

This entry was posted on Friday, October 18th, 2013 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Real world security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.