Tor Vulnerability 08-09-2013, 04:04 PM
#1
First of all this is not a tutorial. As it was requested i post this link which explains a congestion attack to identify the first node (user who wants to stay anonymous) in a tor circuit. I Apologize i cannot write about it in details but i am very busy, so i provide the link below :
Code:
http://freehaven.net/anonbib/papers/congestion-longpaths.pdf- Please notice that this is a research paper so it's not an easy reading however it fully explains the problem.
- For those who wander what's the solution : Tor project has implemented bridges which hides most relays making this congestion attack not feasible. Another possible solution is to customize the path length (if i'm not mistaken 8 hops is the maximum). Tor default is 3 so when you estabilish a circuit by default it will be 3 hops long.
- Making longer paths, 4 + hops, will make congestion attack infeasible as tor switches circuits every 10 minutes and experimental results showed that it is not feasible to identify the hops in 10 mins.
- Notice however that increasing the circuit length will very probably cause a slow down in network speed for obvious reasons.
Everything is relative

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