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posted by martyb on Monday July 31 2017, @06:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the Shocked,-shocked! dept.

A Tor Project grandee sought to correct some misconceptions about the anonymizing network during a presentation at the DEF CON hacking convention in Las Vegas on Friday.

Roger Dingledine, one of the three founders of the Tor Project, castigated journos for mischaracterizing the pro-privacy system as a bolthole exclusively used by drug dealers and pedophiles to hide from the authorities.

In fact, he said, only three per cent of Tor users connect to hidden services, suggesting the vast majority of folks on the network are using it to anonymously browse public websites for completely legit purposes. In other words, netizens – from journalists to activists to normal peeps – use Tor to mask their identities from website owners, and it's not just underworld villains.

Dingledine even went as far as saying the dark web – a landscape of websites concealed within networks like Tor – is so insignificant, it can be discounted.

Only 3%, but what a 3% it is, eh?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @07:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @07:42PM (#547321)

    ... does that really provide enough cover traffic to not provide statistical analysis of traffic patterns to help direct hacking and deanonymization efforts against services and clients?

    Tor doesn't rely on "chaffing" (if you will). It relies the multi-layered encryption and on an attacker--or group of attackers--not controlling too much of the Internet or too many Tor nodes.

    A couple of years ago it was shown that an attacker running a guard node could could detect sites running hidden services. [arstechnica.com] I don't know whether there's a defence against that now.

    Additionally, how many of you have used Tor Browser Bundle and noticed that your circuits all seem to either go through hops on different Class A's but all through the same country's GeoIP DB and went not, all hop through either [former] Warsaw Pact countries, or 5 eyes countries.

    It changes randomly. Keep checking and you'll see other variations.