![]() ![]() About 3000 are trusted as guards, and about 1000 as exits. It currently comprises about 6300 servers aka relays. While it’s somewhat decentralized, it’s not a P2P network. And so it didn’t implement caching or mixing. Tor was designed to provide users with low-latency access to Internet resources. And that kept them too small to effectively resist traffic analysis. However, they were complicated, and so not many ever used them. And they introduce uncertainty by mixing messages before forwarding. ![]() Nodes introduce latency by caching messages. It’s an elegant approach, and potentially very effective against traffic analysis. Īlthough the details of his implementation aren’t relevant here, all systems that provide substantial anonymity rely on distributing information and trust.Ĭhaum’s approach for “untraceable electronic mail” was first implemented in the Mixmaster and Cypherpunk remailer networks. In contrast, systems based on the solution advanced here can be compromised only by subversion or conspiracy of all of a set of authorities. Baran has solved the traffic analysis problem for networks, but requires each participant to trust a common authority. This paper presents a solution to the traffic analysis problem that is based on public key cryptography. To my knowledge, it was David Chaum who first noted that in “Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, and Digital Pseudonyms”, published in 1981: However, you can reduce the risk of compromise by distributing information and trust. There is indeed no protection against adversaries that are omniscient and omnipotent. You’re stuck with trusting it, or at least, trusting that its infrastructure is secure. Or who it’s cooperating with, or compromised by. That’s because there’s no way to know what information it - or an adversary with access to its infrastructure - is retaining. And Perfect Privacy further claims that its NeuroRouting option minimizes Internet exposure of users’ traffic, by selecting an entry server near the user, and an exit server near the site being accessed, perhaps in the same data center.īut here’s the problem: You can’t rely on an anonymous proxy to actually hide anything. Some emphasize that all traffic between VPN servers is securely encrypted. So an adversary couldn’t see traffic by pwning just one data center or ISP. Traffic gets routed through multiple servers, often on different continents. That is, the proxy isn’t just a single server. Some VPN services offer multi-hop routing to protect against traffic analysis and infrastructure compromise. And even Cloudflare’s VPN Warp does that, by design, because its focus is protection from local adversaries. Some people still use HTTPS and SOCKS proxies, but those are iffy, because they may leak users’ IP addresses to sites. VPN Services and Anonymous ProxiesĪnyway, such intermediaries are generally called “anonymous proxies”. That is, we must compartmentalize our online personas from our meatspace identities. So it’s best to avoid metadata that creates associations with our meatspace identities or locations. Even then, metadata that’s required for addressing and transport can’t be hidden. However, they can still see content and metadata, unless you use apps with end-to-end encryption. It also hides your ISP-assigned IP address from remote adversaries. That protects almost everything from local adversaries, except for time and traffic pattern, and of course the IP address of the intermediary. And all traffic between our devices and the intermediary must be securely encrypted. OK, so how can we fully hide content, metadata and IP addresses?īasically, there must be an intermediary. Although apps with end-to-end encryption will hide content, and some metadata, they don’t hide local or remote IP addresses. And remote adversaries can still see content and metadata, and your ISP-assigned IP address. However, your ISP and other local adversaries can still see IP addresses that you access, and all communication content and metadata. But now, at least, it’s feasible with the Librem 5 and PinePhone. While that’s a typical professional setup for broadband, virtually nobody does it for smartphones. That helps prevent leakage of information about your identity and location, and also protects your devices from compromise by external adversaries. Instead, you connect them through a standalone modem/router using Ethernet, and interpose a hardware firewall between the modem/router and your devices. Basically, you don’t connect devices directly to the Internet. The first step is securing your Internet connection. Online privacy and anonymity depend on preventing your ISP and other local adversaries from seeing communication content or metadata, and on preventing remote adversaries from seeing information about your identity or location. ![]()
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