{"id":77,"date":"2011-04-27T09:52:38","date_gmt":"2011-04-27T14:52:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hroberts\/?p=77"},"modified":"2011-04-29T12:12:02","modified_gmt":"2011-04-29T17:12:02","slug":"tor-and-journalism-vulnerabilities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hroberts\/2011\/04\/27\/tor-and-journalism-vulnerabilities\/","title":{"rendered":"Tor and Journalism Vulnerabilities"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was recently quoted in a story in the New Scientist<\/a> about a new attack<\/a> on Tor<\/a>. The quote was a combination of somewhat sloppy wording on my part and a lack of context on the reporter’s part, so I’d like to provide context and more precise wording here. The quote is:<\/p>\n

\n“There are lots of vulnerabilities in Tor, and Tor has always been open about the various vulnerabilities in its system,” says Hal Roberts at Harvard University, who studies censorship and privacy technologies. “Tor is far from perfect but better than anything else widely available.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The basic idea of the attack described in the article is to use a rogue Tor exit node<\/a> to insert an address owned by the attacker into a BitTorrent stream to fool the client into connecting to that address via UDP, which is not anonymized by Tor. So when the BitTorrent client connects to the UDP address, the attacker can discover the attacker’s real IP address. This sort of attack on Tor is well known — the paper’s authors call it a ‘bad apple’ attack. Tor’s core job is just to provide a secure TCP tunnel, but most real world applications do much more than just communicating via a single TCP connection. For example, in addition to HTTP requests for web pages, web browsers make DNS requests to lookup host names, so any end user packaging of Tor has to make sure that DNS lookups happen over the Tor tunnel (as does TorButton). Tor does not ultimately control the applications that use its tunnels but relies on those applications to use its TCP tunnel exclusively to maintain the privacy of the user.<\/p>\n

Tor’s conundrum is that at the end of the day what end users need is anonymous communications through applications, not secure TCP tunnels. So even though Tor can’t be responsible for making every application in existence behave nicely with it, to be actually useful it has to take some responsibility for the most common end user applications. To this end, Tor works closely with the Firefox developers to make Firefox work as well as possible with Tor, and Tor and associated folks have invested lots of effort into tools<\/a> that<\/a> improve<\/a> the interface between the browser, the user, and Tor. But there’s only so much that Tor can do here in the world of all applications. <\/p>\n

These attacks might not be considered ‘vulnerabilities in Tor’, as I say above, so I should have been more careful with my language (though most folks who do these press interviews struggle with the danger of any given sentence out of an hour long conversation not having precise language that can stand out of context of the rest of the conversation). But the basic point remains — there are lots of ways to break through the privacy of Tor as it is used in the real world, and Tor has been completely open about those in an effort to educate its user base and provide ‘open research questions’ (Roger Dingledine’s<\/a> favorite phrase!) for its developer community. Roger’s response to the specific BitTorrent problem is simply to tell Tor users not to use BitTorrent over Tor<\/a> because there’s no way that Tor itself can fix all of the broken BitTorrent clients in the world, but one of the core findings of the above paper is that lots of people do use BitTorrent clients over Tor. So that’s a really hard problem.<\/p>\n

The attack described in the paper has a second component that is more directly a vulnerability of Tor than a ‘bad apple’ application attack. The second component is that Tor does not create a new circuit of nodes for every connection, but instead re-uses the same circuit for several connections from the same client to improve performance. This behavior makes it possible to identify the origin IP address of not just the one ‘bad apple’ connection (the BitTorrent connection in the paper’s attack) but also the origin IP address of other current connections by the same user. So a user who is using BitTorrent and browsing the web at the same time exposes not just her BitTorrent activities but also her web browsing activities to the attacker (the paper’s authors say ‘one bad apple spoils the bunch’). <\/p>\n

This attack can be more traditionally described as a ‘vulnerability in Tor.’ Claiming ‘lots’ of these is sloppy language, but there is certainly a whole class of timing \/ tagging attacks<\/a> that allow an attacker who has control of an entry and an exit node to identify users (and I think the risk of these attacks is more than theoretical in a world in which one ISP in China controls about 63%<\/a> of the country’s IP addresses).<\/p>\n

So to return to the quote and story, I spoke to the author of the piece for about an hour, most of which I spent trying to convince him not to write a ‘TOR IS BROKEN!’ piece that hyped this attack as the one, new chink in Tor’s otherwise pristine armor. I walked through the above, trying to explain that Tor is intended to do a single specific thing (anonymize communication through a TCP tunnel) but that there are various attacks that exploit the layer between Tor and the applications that use it. And there are also attacks like the circuit association described above that are more properly vulnerabilities in Tor itself. But many examples of both of these sorts of attacks have been around for as long as Tor has been around, and Tor has been very vocal about them. <\/p>\n

I was trying (unsuccessfully!) to steer the reporter toward explaining the vulnerability as an example of how it is important that users understand that even a project like Tor that is very strongly focused on anonymity over other properties can’t provide perfect privacy for its users, that there are some things it does well but not perfectly (setting up anonymous TCP tunnels) and other things it does not as well (automagically make any application using Tor anonymous). To borrow Roger’s favorite phrase, how to explain complex social \/ technical issues like this one to reporters is still an open research question for which I’m eager to hear solutions!<\/p>\n

Update<\/b>: The reporter who wrote the article reminded me nicely that the only contact he had with me for this article was a single email exchange, so evidently I made up the long conversation with the reporter in my mind. In my defense, I give a lot of interviews on circumvention related topics, and I can actually still (falsely!) remember standing in the my house having this call with the reporter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was recently quoted in a story in the New Scientist about a new attack on Tor. The quote was a combination of somewhat sloppy wording on my part and a lack of context on the reporter’s part, so I’d like to provide context and more precise wording here. The quote is: “There are lots […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hroberts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hroberts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hroberts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hroberts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hroberts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hroberts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hroberts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions\/86"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hroberts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hroberts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hroberts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}