Wikileaks Was Launched With Documents Intercepted From Tor

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/wikileaks-documents/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

by jackfoxy • 16 years ago

78 24 16 years ago

wired.com

teilo• 16 years ago

Talk about a conflict of interest. May I be the first to suggest that this falls into the bombshell category?

pavs3• 16 years ago

How is this conflict of interest? They were eavesdropping on private tor communication, albeit morally questionable action.

Either way I lost most of my respect for them long time ago, they are not much different from other news organization, they just put a sensationalist spin to their news. Take whatever they give with a grain of salt and understand that they are only portraying one side of the story.

jorgeortiz85• 16 years ago

Say what you want about the methods, motives, and spin of the people behind Wikileaks, but the fact is they release an incredible amount of credible primary sources. You can dismiss their spin, but you can't dismiss the hard facts they've uncovered.

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

It's somewhat burried in the article but it is at least claimed they weren't so much eavesdropping as they were "re-stealing" documents which had already been stolen (by Chinese hackers).

It's still questionable but in a more muddy category...

orborde• 16 years ago

A poignant reminder that Tor is just one of many tools and practices necessary to maintain security and privacy.

I remember during Wired's "Vanish" contest ( http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/11/ff_vanish2/ ), the guy on the run was using Tor. As such, there was talk about setting up a bugged Tor exit node with lots of reported bandwidth to try to intercept his Gmail sessions. I ran the odds (figuring his client chose exit nodes at random), and there was a decent chance that his traffic would have been captured at least once over the month of the contest. Unfortunately, someone pointed out that it ran afoul of wiretap laws. And the SSL MITM shenanigans to try to capture his email password would definitely have been illegal. So the idea was shelved.

smallblacksun• 16 years ago

Which shows a serious flaw with the contest. The only people you would go to these lengths to avoid would be someone from the government or a criminal organization. Those are exactly the two groups who either don't have the law apply to them, or are willing to break the law.

mjgoins• 16 years ago

I believe if the final destination of the tor communication had been https, wikileaks could not have eavesdropped and read the documents. The article fails to make that distinction when it says:

  By necessity, however, the last node through which traffic   passes has to
  decrypt the communication before delivering it to its final destination.

tptacek• 16 years ago

This is the big problem I have with Tor, and, in particular, with the people who recommend Tor to people with serious privacy needs (such as the Iranian dissidents). A heist like this is possible because putting your traffic on Tor flags it as belonging to a subset of all traffic that is more likely to contain interesting information.

It's the same with the people trying to help Chinese dissidents evade the "great firewall". Maybe you're really helping them evade the firewall. Or, maybe you're helping a savvy government agency zero in on the traffic worth monitoring.

I worry that to the people providing the anonymizing and securing technology, this is a game. It's not for the people using the technology.

m0nastic• 16 years ago

I agree with your sentiments. TOR is designed for anonymity, not privacy; which is something I think is lost on many people who use it.

If you're transmitting information that is personally identifiable, TOR isn't the means to do it. The issue I see, is that there isn't really a solution for people concerned with that.

stipes2• 16 years ago

Yes, Tor is for anonymity, not privacy. But that just means you still need to be operating over a secure channel---be that SSL or sending the documents encrypted, etc.

The fact that they operated compromised nodes does NOT diminish from Tor's anonymity. Most anonymity systems assume about 1/5 of the nodes will be compromised (which is reasonable barring a very large global adversary).

In general, timing attacks are the biggest issue in low-latency anonymity systems: if you can track packets going into Tor and coming out of Tor, you can link the sender to the destination. But, if the traffic was encrypted, that still doesn't get you the documents themselves.

Edit: More specifically to the grandparent---even with a compromised exit node, that doesn't reveal the source (that's the point of onion routing). The case of China is a hard one, due to the level of state control. There are ways to request exit nodes in the Tor network (I have no idea how well documented this is), so for them, selecting an exit outside China for accessing international sites would probably be best (this would remove/greatly reduce the risk of Chinese gov't timing attacks).

There has been some work on strategically choosing entrance/exit nodes to reduce the risk of these kinds of timing attacks, but I don't know of anything that has been published or implemented yet (I haven't worked on that particular aspect in a while). Basically, some of the methods would have automatically chosen exit nodes outside of China (to prevent exit->destination traffic from travelling through the same autonomous systems as source->entrance traffic).

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

Stick a fork in them, they are done.

Groxx2• 16 years ago

I'm of the mindset that if you require anonymity and privacy, and use tools you do not even RTFM for, nor do some basic investigation into the field, you deserve what happens to you.

Go Wikileaks. Capitalizing on stupidity for great justice FTW.

naz2• 16 years ago

I doubt China cared about the privacy of the documents they stole.

Groxx2• 16 years ago

Which has what to do with what?

The sources they stole from (if you're referring to "the big one" a little while ago) did know the basics, and presumably quite a bit more than many places. It was a fairly sophisticated attack. It's part of the risk you run in connecting to the internet in the first place, but it's 100% different than people who think TOR makes all their data private, which they'd learn if they read the short intro page. Notably the two sentences that are important enough to get their own paragraph:

"Tor doesn't magically encrypt all of your Internet activities, though. You should understand what Tor does and does not do for you."

zitterbewegung• 16 years ago

Hrm, in 2007 people were able to intercept traffic from Tor quite easily by using a packet sniffer on an exit node. It looks like wikileaks got information through an implementation of this hack possibly?

Link: https://lwn.net/Articles/249388/

ZachPruckowski• 16 years ago

Intercepting TOR traffic is trivial, it's not really a hack. They could have just run a TOR exit node of their own, and seen what came through unencrypted. The point of TOR is not to keep the traffic private (you use end-to-end encryption for that), it's to obscure the sender.

shareme• 16 years ago

ahem this has been debunked folks by wikileaks itself..

btn• 16 years ago

Where? They seem to endorse the New Yorker article; linking to it on their front page.

Wikileaks Was Launched With Documents Intercepted From Tor

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