Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (2004)

https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-design.html

by jarvl • 8 years ago

84 71 8 years ago

svn.torproject.org

jayess• 8 years ago

It mentions mixmaster and mixminion, but those projects seem to have died. I feel like they are needed more than ever.

simmons• 8 years ago

Indeed. I've often thought that such high-latency mix-nets (with their potentially superior resistance to traffic analysis) would be a nice complement to low-latency networks like Tor.

ahf• 8 years ago

Have a look at Katzenpost. They are trying to build a modern, high-latency, mix network.

https://katzenpost.mixnetworks.org/

admax88q• 8 years ago

I2P provides cover traffic. I believe GNUnet can also be configured to use a certain amount of cover traffic.

jandrese4• 8 years ago

The downside is that browsing the web on a service like that sucks ass. Tor trades off some security for a basic level of user experience.

Sadly, modern web design makes stuff like WWWoffle less useful than it used to be. Plus it's difficult to set up fully anonymous services on the far side of the link, I mean you're using Tor for a reason, and leaving breadcrumbs on the far side of the network is risky.

Jumziey• 8 years ago

Apparently not safe for work

TomMarius• 8 years ago

A company could have a lot of problems if one of their employees decided to host a node in their network, so quite literally yeah

vbezhenar3• 8 years ago

What kind of problems company could have?

vippy• 8 years ago

I keep copies of these papers in a safe in case I never need to re-develop the Internet from scratch. No seriously, the Tor papers are amazing and even hint at the means by which Tor might be manipulated to, say, track down someone like Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road, who is currently serving a double life sentence, plus forty years, without the possibility of parole.

snvzz• 8 years ago

Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road, who is currently serving

For running a free market. It's fucked up.

onetimemanytime5• 8 years ago

Can I open e free market for contract killers? Lowest bidder and fastest killer would win

branweb2• 8 years ago

technically it was for hiring someone to murder a guy. Or are you implying that was entrapment?

edit: i stand corrected

escape_goat• 8 years ago

I believe that he was sentenced for money-laundering, hacking, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics. You do yourself no service to memoize this as "running a free market."

iondfgnio• 8 years ago

Stop trying to rewrite history. He was convicted of running the market, but the reason the judge threw the book at him is because he tried to have five people killed.

Because it is contested, the Court must make appropriate factual findings if it is to include it. The standard by which I do that is by a preponderance of the evidence. Ulbricht's directed violence here is and relates to the murders for hire which he is alleged to have commissioned and paid for. The Court must determine whether these allegations have been demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence and I find that there is ample and unambiguous evidence that Ulbricht commissioned five murders as part of his efforts to protect his criminal enterprise and that he paid for these murders. There is no evidence that he was role-playing.

https://freeross.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Sentencing_2...

Maybe you think he didn't try to commission murders. Maybe you think judges shouldn't have so much latitude in deciding sentences. But the simple fact remains: Ulbricht is serving two life sentences mostly because the judge found that he tried to kill five people.

rayvy• 8 years ago

I myself have read this particular paper a few times, and plan to put a fresh printed copy in a cover protector. Something about keeping this thing for years strikes a chord with me

miles_bytes81• 8 years ago

I love Tor and use it often (also collaborated with code and nodes). But the problem lately is that all sites are banning it. Even HN, gives you trouble when connecting through Tor.

lallysingh• 8 years ago

Tor is often a vector for abuse, so tor node IPs get banned. I'd like to see a way to have nodes block certain origins without being able to identify them.

Ajedi32• 8 years ago

Tor is great, but it's always been a bit slow. Now that cryptocurrency is a thing, I often wonder if that problem could be solved by incentivizing the running of relays and exit nodes through microtransactions without compromising privacy. Would be great if we could make Tor fast enough that it could actually be used as a substitute for commercial VPNs.

Forbo2• 8 years ago

In my experience, Tor runs about as well as ProtonVPN with their "Secure Core" option enabled (which adds routing through an additional hop located somewhere in the EU). Tor has pretty good throughput, I think the problem is the the additional latency that comes from routing through multiple nodes.

jstanley4• 8 years ago

It's not too slow these days. I routinely browse over Tor, including watching YouTube videos, and it doesn't feel substantially different to just my ordinary ADSL connection.

kodablah6• 8 years ago

Tor's slowness (often overstated) is more about hop count and geographic diversity than relay/exit node count.

blfr• 8 years ago

It has been getting faster lately, and I mean last couple of years. Or maybe my tolerance grew from using LTE but I'm pretty sure it has been getting faster.

conradev• 8 years ago

That is being worked on! It’s called Orchid:

https://www.orchid.com/

kodablah6• 8 years ago

Is there more info about active development? That site doesn't say much. I found some GitHub repos that were last updated in the summer[0]. It's going to be unfortunate if they stay with AGPL.

0 - https://github.com/orchidsource

arpstick• 8 years ago

That reminds me of this little onion routering thingy i made that spiraled out of control into a semi functioning project that I got hired to work on full time

(https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network)

neuroscr• 8 years ago

Also a dev on loki-network, we have $4.1+ million USD so far invested in relays (and potentially exits). It's layer 3 (so think more like i2p) but newer crypto and much better latency.

A good overview of the project is here: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/blob/master/doc...

other docs here: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/blob/master/doc...

Join our test-net now: https://discord.gg/eB8k6xQ or #llarp on freenode

AnaniasAnanas2• 8 years ago

There is also I2P which is just like Tor but unlike it is designed to withstand the traffic from bittorrent clients (useful for people living in dorms on in America) and can also tunnel UDP (unlike Tor which can only tunnel TCP).

That being said, I really like the new onion-v3 protocol that Tor added as it moves from the outdated 1024-bit rsa + sha1 addresses with 1024-bit DH and AES-128 to the state-of-the-art ed25519 for addresses and handshake as well as chacha20-poly1305 for encryption.

LMYahooTFY2• 8 years ago

I think it's an important distinction that one has identified developers, and one has anonymous developers.

It doesn't seem clear to me that one is generally better than another, I think they complement each other.

malvosenior• 8 years ago

Tor is great! Sadly HN shadow bans all accounts created with it. Lots of other services also won’t let you sign up or require a phone verification if you use it.

ngneer• 8 years ago

News?

Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (2004)

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