Researchers Peel the Onion Router IDG News Service (03/02/07) Kirk, Jeremy
as it appeared in the March 2, 2007 edition of ACM TechNews.
Researchers at the University of Colorado in Boulder say they have cracked The Onion Router (Tor), but add that such networks remain effective. In fact, their Web site describes Tor as the "most secure and usable privacy-enhancing system available." Nonetheless, the researchers say they have built their own Tor network, which includes malicious servers that were able to draw a substantial amount of routing requests by misrepresenting their bandwidth capability, and used an algorithm to connect the "path" of a Web site request. According to their paper, paths could be calculated, revealing where the traffic came from, more than 46 percent of the time. Tor is designed to provide anonymity to users by facilitating the development of networks of servers that send traffic over a number of different routes. However, the researchers say law enforcement officials or organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America would be able to use their approach to track down Tor users. "We have never seen such an attack 'in the wild,' and we think it no more likely that this paper would make such an attack easier or more likely than it was a few years ago when another version of it was documented," responded Tor executive director Shava Nerad in a blog. Click Here to View Full Article For more information on TOR
