As Studies Show Privacy Network Offers Superficial Anonymity The Fact Is That You Are Not Anonymous On Tor.

What Is The Tor Network Up To? 

As a recently published research has shown a great number of network’s exit relays that are compromised, privacy advocates are growing leery of the Tor network these days. Publishing a new Tor report that shows IP addresses being uncovered, furthermore on September 15, is the Hacker Factor Blog. It is an open secret among the internet service community that you are not anonymous on Tor according to the paper called Tor 0-day. 

A great number of digital currency proponents have then utilised Tor and the virtual private networks to stay anonymous while sending bitcoin transactions for years now. It has always claimed to obfuscate internet traffic for the end-user as the Tor Project was released 17 years ago in 2002. 

Leveraging a volunteer overlay network consisting of thousands of different relayers is essentially the software written in C and Python. Meant to conceal a user’s activity on the internet and allowing for uncontrolled confidential communications are the very basics of this network. 

A number of individuals have exposed a few of Tor’s weaknesses since Covid-19 started and during the months that followed. The large-scale use of malicious relays was one Tor vulnerability exposed in August.

23% of Tor’s current exit capacity is currently compromised according to a paper written by the researcher dubbed Nusenu. While his research fell on deaf ears, Nusenu also warned of this issue months ago in December 2019. Detailing that IP addresses can be detected when they connect directly to Tor or leverage a bridge, following Nusenu’s critique is another scathing report called Tor 0-day

That users are not anonymous on Tor, the paper Tor 0day stresses it is pretty much an open secret between those who know. A follow up will publish data that describes a lot of vulnerabilities for Tor as the research is part one of a new series. Why the attacks are defined as zero-day attacks, the hacker describes in part one how to detect people as they connect to the Tor network both directly and through bridges. 

How Are Tor Users Being Tracked? 

By tracking Tor bridge users and uncovering all the bridges, further the blog post shows the reader how to identify the real network address of Tor users. What’s worse is that none of the exploits in the blog entry are new or novel, as the researcher stressed, that the study shows that anyone leveraging the Tor network should be very leery of these types of zero-day attacks. Identifying an approach for deanonymizing hidden services with similar Tor exploits mentioned was the Hacker Factor Blog author citing a paper from 2012.

Part one of the series notes that these exploits represent a fundamental flaw in the current Tor architecture. Providing network anonymity for users and hidden services is what people often think about Tor. Tor however really only provides superficial anonymity. Owning one guard is enough to provide that correlation for popular hidden services Tor does not protect against end-to-end correlation.

A brutal critique of the entire Tor network is what the blog post says that the next article in the series will be. Entities with an incentive have likely figured out how to deanonymize Tor users as it doesn’t take too much imagination to understand that in 17 years.

The first Tor 0-day paper concludes that someone with enough incentive can block Tor connections thereby uniquely tracking bridge users, mapping exit traffic to users, or thereafter finding hidden service network addresses. They are all in the realm of feasible and are all currently being exploited while most of these exploits require special access owning some Tor nodes or having service level access from a major network provider. 

Here the paper adds that

For Tor, that’s a lot of vulnerabilities. What’s then left to exploit? The entire Tor networks? The next blog entry will be that. 

All About Nym 

Aiming to offer anonymity online but also claiming it will be better than Tor, VPNs, and I2P meanwhile there is another privacy project in the works called Nym. By entities capable of monitoring the entire network’s entry and exit nodes Nym’s website also says that Tor’s anonymity features can be compromised. The Nym network is a decentralised and tokenised infrastructure providing holistic privacy from the network layer to the application layer as in contrast the Nym project’s lite paper details. 

Users will be rewarded in bitcoin as the Nym project recently initiated a tokenised testnet experiment with over 100 mixnodes. 

Rewarded for the mixing process, Nym utilises a mixnet that aims to protect a user’s network traffic and mixes. 

The lite paper explains the intensive but useful computation needed to route packets on behalf of other users in a privacy-enhanced manner rather than mining. As the Nym blockchain maintains the state of credentials and the operations of the mixnet, furthermore Nym is compatible with any blockchain. 

Finally, The Rewards For Nym Team. 

Leveraging bitcoin for rewards, the Nym team recently invoked a tokenised testnet experiment. A great number of people set up mixnodes and they had to close the testing ground because it had gone over 100 mixnodes as the announcement said. The Nym development team’s website details that even though individuals can set up a mix node be prepared for the next round.