Large Illegal Marketplace Offline For Tor-Vulnerability

A large illegal market on the Tor network has decided to temporarily offline due to vulnerabilities in the Tor network, so have the managers through Pastebin announced. It is Agora, the largest illegal market on the Tor network.

Through the website is handled in narcotics. The Agora administrators point to recent studies showing that web servers can be identified on the Tor network. These so-called "Tor hidden services" are only accessible via the Tor network and should not be localized. Recently, researchers showed that they were able to identify 88% of the hidden services in a test set-up.

According to the Tor Project, the developers of the Tor software and the Tor network, the impact of the attack revealed that bad. Yet the reason for the administrators of the Agora marketplace to temporarily pull the plug on the website. In a statement they say that it is unsafe to allow visitors to the website, since they are at risk. It is now working on a solution, but it is unknown when they will appear.

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.

Tor Is Promoting Use Of Hidden Websites

The Tor network not only provides users the ability to hide their IP address, even turning and visiting hidden sites and services is possible. And it is this feature of Tor developers who now want to bring wider attention.

Through the hidden sites and services, on the Tor network if hidden services identified, people can share information anonymously and safely. So bloggers, activists, journalists and organizations under other totalitarian regimes use it.Newspapers like the Washington Post and Human Rights organizations like Amnesty International use them again to receive leaked information. "The potential of hidden services is huge and much still needs to be explored there," said Tor developers.They want to make the technology therefore accessible to a larger audience.

The Tor developers look for hidden services namely an important role when it comes to the future of secure communication.To realize this, the uses of hidden services will have to be increased, there must be mobile support for mobile applications and will eventually also the number of people that have to grow hidden services used. At this time, approximately 4% of the Tor-traffic originating from hidden services. To determine where the emphasis will be launched a crowd funding campaign on.

While looking for the Tor Project ideas for hidden services to crowd funded. Meanwhile, there are three ideas conceived, including an information for administrators of hidden services and hidden services where anonymity is paramount but speed.In this case, the hidden service will not care about their own anonymity, but that visitors anonymously and securely connect through the Tor network. It involves, for example initiatives of Facebook and Reddit to also be active in the Tor network.Other ideas via this page to reach out to.

Almost 97% Of Tor Traffic Goes To 'Normal' Websites

Almost 97% of the traffic that will generate Tor users to 'normal' websites over the internet anyone can visit, according to research from the Tor Project. Tor is a software that allows users not only to hide their IP address, but also makes it possible to visit Tor sites that are only accessible through the Tor network.These are the so-called "hidden services".

The Tor Project wanted to know how many of the Tor traffic goes to these hidden services. For this was the collaboration of several volunteers to share data from their Tor server. This enabled the Tor Project a small proportion (2% - 5%) of activities in hidden view services. Establish on the basis of current calculations, the researchers found that each day 30,000 hidden services are active. These websites generate every day 400 to 600Mbit per second of traffic, which amounts to about 5 terabytes of data per day.

Furthermore, it appears that is the Tor traffic from Tor users to these hidden services 3.4% of the total Tor traffic. This means that 96.6% of the Tor traffic to "normal" websites is that anyone can access through a browser. Tor came last year regularly negative in the news because Tor would mainly be used for visiting criminal Tor sites. Now it appears that the most traffic to websites is that outside Gate to visit.

The researchers suggest that it is still to preliminary results in that regard are established on the basis of a limited data set, and with a grain would have to be taken. The study was conducted over a period of several months, but the researchers plan to expand further in the future. They want to know how many people visit daily Tor sites and how often people try to visit a hidden service that no longer exists.

"Unfortunately, some of these questions with the current reporting infrastructure are not easy to answer, mostly because the collection in this way can reveal hidden information about specific services, as well as the results of the current system include excess  dates." The researchers are also looking at aggregation protocols for statistics that they can use in place of the current system, so they still safe to collect all kinds of statistics.