Tor Project Not Worried About Another Attack On Hidden Services

Scientists have found two ways to hidden services on the Tor network and its users, identify, but according to the Tor Project is the impact of the attacks it. Hidden services include websites that can be hosted on the Tor network. The address of the website is generally known only to the administrator and the website itself can only be accessed through the Tor network.

The well-known marketplace Silk Road was an example of a hidden service. According to scientists from MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) there is a vulnerability ( pdf ) present in the design of Tor, which can be established that makes a Tor user of a hidden service use. Hidden services themselves could be identified with an accuracy of 88% and a comparable rate could be determined which sites a user has visited.
Tor network

The Tor-network consists of several nodes, also known as relays, on which the traffic runs. It is in this case for servers of the user's request, for example to ask a website via the Tor network to forward. For example, the first node is the "entry guard" that the request of the Tor-user to the "relay node" forward. Then it goes from this node to the "exit node", which sends the request to the Internet. An attacker or intelligence can add one or more servers in the Tor network. However, the attacker can not determine which node the user will use.

According to Tor developer Roger Dingledine consists attack the scientists of three phases, so he lets in a blog posting know. During the first phase, the attacker must have the luck that his server as entry guard is used by the user that he has in mind. During the second phase, the user loads a web site via the Tor network and investigators use a classifier to guess whether it is a web site on the Tor network or on the "ordinary" internet.

Next, a second classifier is used to determine which site-Tor was. According Dingledine is the extent to which the classifier used by the researchers to identify websites is accurate. The research was based on a thousand websites, but according to previous research would be millions of websites are hosted on the Tor network. In this case, the researchers would in most cases not been able to establish the identity of a web site.

In addition, there are also steps which may take the Tor network which make it more difficult for an attacker to determine or create a target site with a gate-connection or not. Altogether Dingledine is pleased with the study because it raises some interesting questions, however, the impact of the attacks described in the really easy.