Juan Garofalo: > For what it's worth : trying to have a diverse and big user base, and > providing security for all users seems to be impossible. You either provide > relatively good security for a small number of sensitive users, or relatively > lax security for 'general' users.
i have to disagree here. TOR is an anonymity network, and those require a diverse and big user base as what is commonly referred to as the anonymity set. only if that set cannot be targeted as a group (for whatever reason), the whole thing makes sense and actually protects anyone using it. TOR is in an arms race on the obfuscation front, hence all the hassle with bridges and so on. if/when using tor is outright outlawed (ohai, russia?) in your jurisdiction, that is a problem. right now, the general idea is that if lets say, lawyers, doctors and priests made a point of using TOR, these "bona fide" groups would protect the rest of the user base from action against all users since they are "legally protected", "part of the establishment" or "too much of a PR disaster as targets". that being said, yea, there is a problem with the global passive adversary that we have to assume NSA and "friends" to be. and i don't really see a viable technical solution so far. not saying there aren't any, mind you. beyond the technical realm however, and aside from reigning in the security deep state that has metastasized throughout the west (which needs to be done, but it will take a lot of time), what a system like TOR needs to become more robust in the passive adversary context is political hacking that makes it possible to run exit nodes in really diverse places, away from networks owned by corporations with offices in the Five Eyes member states, because the design does hold merit against local passive adversaries. -- tor-talk mailing list - [email protected] To unsusbscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
