Thursday 6 August 2015

MIT Cracks Tor Anonymity & Finds Hidden Servers


Blogger: Hannah Doughty

The Tor network is comprised of 2.5 million daily users that include journalists, political activists, terrorists and others who don't want to share their browser histories with Google, Facebook and other commercial entities.
Computer scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have displayed a security vulnerability affecting the Tor anonymity network. This makes it possible to identify hidden servers with up to 88 percent accuracy — bad news for daily Tor users that rely on the service.
Tor enables the hosting of websites that are not found via a Google search or by directly typing in a website URL. These hidden services that protect a site's IP address and other identifying information are what scientists at MIT have unveiled.
The researchers showed that by looking for patterns in the number of packets passing in each direction through a guard, machine-learning algorithms determine whether the circuit was an ordinary web-browsing circuit, an introduction-point circuit, or a rendezvous-point circuit, being 99 percent accurate.
The attack works by collecting a large amount of network data from a pre-determined list of Tor hidden services in advance of assigning a digital fingerprint to all services in question — all done without breaking Tor's encryption.
Source and more on this story at SCMagazine 

Do you know who is talking about you on the deep and dark web?
How do you decipher that? 

No comments:

Post a Comment