Misplaced Pages

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57-473: With over 14,000 members, the site used Tor and used some escrow features like Silk Road -like darknet markets , but otherwise many deals took place off-site using off-the-record messaging . It is the longest lived darknet market, running from September 2012 to July 2017, inspired by the success of the Silk Road. The administrator who went by the handle 'Darkside', claimed the site made around $ 250,000

114-505: A Massachusetts -based 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization responsible for maintaining Tor. The EFF acted as The Tor Project's fiscal sponsor in its early years, and early financial supporters included the U.S. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and International Broadcasting Bureau , Internews , Human Rights Watch , the University of Cambridge , Google , and Netherlands-based Stichting NLnet . Over

171-464: A "technical breakthrough" that allowed tracking physical locations of servers, and the initial number of infiltrated sites led to the exploit speculation. A Tor Project representative downplayed this possibility, suggesting that execution of more traditional police work was more likely. In November 2015, court documents suggested a connection between the attack and arrests, and raised concerns about security research ethics. The documents revealed that

228-602: A Tor network, the traffic is sent from router to router along the circuit, ultimately reaching an exit node at which point the cleartext packet is available and is forwarded on to its original destination. Viewed from the destination, the traffic appears to originate at the Tor exit node. Tor's application independence sets it apart from most other anonymity networks: it works at the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) stream level. Applications whose traffic

285-766: A destination server the fact that a user is connecting via Tor. Operators of Internet sites therefore have the ability to prevent traffic from Tor exit nodes or to offer reduced functionality for Tor users. For example, Misplaced Pages generally forbids all editing when using Tor or when using an IP address also used by a Tor exit node, and the BBC blocks the IP addresses of all known Tor exit nodes from its iPlayer service. Apart from intentional restrictions of Tor traffic, Tor use can trigger defense mechanisms on websites intended to block traffic from IP addresses observed to generate malicious or abnormal traffic. Because traffic from all Tor users

342-621: A particular person already under suspicion was sending Tor traffic at the exact times the connections in question occurred. The relay early traffic confirmation attack also relied on traffic confirmation as part of its mechanism, though on requests for onion service descriptors, rather than traffic to the destination server. Like many decentralized systems, Tor relies on a consensus mechanism to periodically update its current operating parameters, which for Tor are network parameters like which nodes are good/bad relays, exits, guards, and how much traffic each can handle. Tor's architecture for deciding

399-632: A popular means of establishing peer-to-peer connections in messaging and file sharing applications. Web-based onion services can be accessed from a standard web browser without client-side connection to the Tor network using services like Tor2web , which remove client anonymity. Like all software with an attack surface , Tor's protections have limitations, and Tor's implementation or design have been vulnerable to attacks at various points throughout its history. While most of these limitations and attacks are minor, either being fixed without incident or proving inconsequential, others are more notable. Tor

456-477: A user's IP address directly back to an FBI server, and resulted in revealing at least 25 US users as well as numerous users from other countries. McGrath was sentenced to 20 years in prison in early 2014, while at least 18 others (including a former Acting HHS Cyber Security Director) were sentenced in subsequent cases. In August 2013, it was discovered that the Firefox browsers in many older versions of

513-579: A year and avoided law enforcement attention due to its predominant Russian user base and its ban on the sale of goods and services such as hacking . From July 2017, users were unable to login due to DDOS attacks. On September 19, 2017, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs confirmed the site had been terminated in July. This Internet-related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Tor (anonymity network) This

570-647: A year of surveillance, the FBI launched " Operation Torpedo " which resulted in McGrath's arrest and allowed them to install their Network Investigative Technique (NIT) malware on the servers for retrieving information from the users of the three onion service sites that McGrath controlled. The technique exploited a vulnerability in Firefox/Tor Browser that had been already been patched, and therefore targeted users that had not updated. A Flash application sent

627-483: Is accessed through its onion address , usually via the Tor Browser or some other software designed to use Tor. The Tor network understands these addresses by looking up their corresponding public keys and introduction points from a distributed hash table within the network. It can route data to and from onion services, even those hosted behind firewalls or network address translators (NAT), while preserving

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684-418: Is an accepted version of this page Tor is a free overlay network for enabling anonymous communication . Built on free and open-source software and more than seven thousand volunteer-operated relays worldwide, users can have their Internet traffic routed via a random path through the network. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace a user's Internet activity by preventing any single point on

741-512: Is an implementation of onion routing , which encrypts and then randomly bounces communications through a network of relays run by volunteers around the globe. These onion routers employ encryption in a multi-layered manner (hence the onion metaphor) to ensure perfect forward secrecy between relays, thereby providing users with anonymity in a network location. That anonymity extends to the hosting of censorship-resistant content by Tor's anonymous onion service feature. Furthermore, by keeping some of

798-409: Is commonly anonymized using Tor include Internet Relay Chat (IRC), instant messaging , and World Wide Web browsing. Tor can also provide anonymity to websites and other servers. Servers configured to receive inbound connections only through Tor are called onion services (formerly, hidden services ). Rather than revealing a server's IP address (and thus its network location), an onion service

855-412: Is designed to provide relatively high performance network anonymity against an attacker with a single vantage point on the connection (e.g., control over one of the three relays, the destination server, or the user's internet service provider ). Like all current low-latency anonymity networks , Tor cannot and does not attempt to protect against an attacker performing simultaneous monitoring of traffic at

912-520: Is not meant to completely solve the issue of anonymity on the web. Tor is not designed to completely erase tracking but instead to reduce the likelihood for sites to trace actions and data back to the user. Tor is also used for illegal activities. These can include privacy protection or censorship circumvention, as well as distribution of child abuse content, drug sales, or malware distribution. Tor has been described by The Economist , in relation to Bitcoin and Silk Road , as being "a dark corner of

969-494: Is not seen as an acceptable policy option in the U.K." and that "Even if it were, there would be technical challenges." The report further noted that Tor "plays only a minor role in the online viewing and distribution of indecent images of children" (due in part to its inherent latency); its usage by the Internet Watch Foundation , the utility of its onion services for whistleblowers , and its circumvention of

1026-409: Is shared by a comparatively small number of exit relays, tools can misidentify distinct sessions as originating from the same user, and attribute the actions of a malicious user to a non-malicious user, or observe an unusually large volume of traffic for one IP address. Conversely, a site may observe a single session connecting from different exit relays, with different Internet geolocations , and assume

1083-558: Is written primarily in C . NLnet The NLnet Foundation supports organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. It was influential in spreading the Internet throughout Europe in the 1980s. In 1997, the foundation sold off its commercial networking operations to UUNET (now part of Verizon ), resulting in an endowment with which it makes grants. NLnet is known for sponsoring open source software and standards work as well as auxiliary activities. Some of

1140-1016: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistleblowers and human rights workers to communicate with journalists". EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense guide includes a description of where Tor fits in a larger strategy for protecting privacy and anonymity. In 2014, the EFF's Eva Galperin told Businessweek that "Tor's biggest problem is press. No one hears about that time someone wasn't stalked by their abuser. They hear how somebody got away with downloading child porn." The Tor Project states that Tor users include "normal people" who wish to keep their Internet activities private from websites and advertisers, people concerned about cyber-spying, and users who are evading censorship such as activists, journalists, and military professionals. In November 2013, Tor had about four million users. According to

1197-518: The FBI obtained IP addresses of onion services and their visitors from a "university-based research institute", leading to arrests. Reporting from Motherboard found that the timing and nature of the relay early traffic confirmation attack matched the description in the court documents. Multiple experts, including a senior researcher with the ICSI of UC Berkeley , Edward Felten of Princeton University , and

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1254-730: The Great Firewall of China were touted. Tor's executive director, Andrew Lewman, also said in August 2014 that agents of the NSA and the GCHQ have anonymously provided Tor with bug reports. The Tor Project's FAQ offers supporting reasons for the EFF's endorsement: Criminals can already do bad things. Since they're willing to break laws, they already have lots of options available that provide better privacy than Tor provides... Tor aims to provide protection for ordinary people who want to follow

1311-698: The URLs provided under the top-ranked Chinese-language video actually pointed to malware disguised as Tor Browser. Once installed, it saved browsing history and form data that genuine Tor forgot by default, and downloaded malicious components if the device's IP addresses was in China. Kaspersky researchers noted that the malware was not stealing data to sell for profit, but was designed to identify users. Like client applications that use Tor, servers relying on onion services for protection can introduce their own weaknesses. Servers that are reachable through Tor onion services and

1368-611: The Wall Street Journal , in 2012 about 14% of Tor's traffic connected from the United States, with people in "Internet-censoring countries" as its second-largest user base. Tor is increasingly used by victims of domestic violence and the social workers and agencies that assist them, even though shelter workers may or may not have had professional training on cyber-security matters. Properly deployed, however, it precludes digital stalking, which has increased due to

1425-526: The HTTPS protections that would have otherwise been used. To attempt to prevent this, Tor Browser has since made it so only connections via onion services or HTTPS are allowed by default. In 2011, the Dutch authority investigating child pornography discovered the IP address of a Tor onion service site from an unprotected administrator's account and gave it to the FBI , who traced it to Aaron McGrath. After

1482-473: The Internet (other than the user's device) from being able to view both where traffic originated from and where it is ultimately going to at the same time. This conceals a user's location and usage from anyone performing network surveillance or traffic analysis from any such point, protecting the user's freedom and ability to communicate confidentially. The core principle of Tor, known as onion routing ,

1539-597: The Tor Browser Bundle were vulnerable to a JavaScript-deployed shellcode attack, as NoScript was not enabled by default. Attackers used this vulnerability to extract users' MAC and IP addresses and Windows computer names. News reports linked this to a FBI operation targeting Freedom Hosting 's owner, Eric Eoin Marques, who was arrested on a provisional extradition warrant issued by a United States' court on 29 July. The FBI extradited Marques from Ireland to

1596-571: The Tor Project agreed that the CERT Coordination Center of Carnegie Mellon University was the institute in question. Concerns raised included the role of an academic institution in policing, sensitive research involving non-consenting users, the non-targeted nature of the attack, and the lack of disclosure about the incident. Many attacks targeted at Tor users result from flaws in applications used with Tor, either in

1653-410: The Tor relays responsible for providing information about onion services) were found to be modifying traffic of requests. The modifications made it so the requesting client's guard relay, if controlled by the same adversary as the onion service directory node, could easily confirm that the traffic was from the same request. This would allow the adversary to simultaneously know the onion service involved in

1710-603: The U.S. government variously fund Tor (the U.S. State Department , the National Science Foundation, and – through the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which itself partially funded Tor until October 2012 – Radio Free Asia ) and seek to subvert it. Tor was one of a dozen circumvention tools evaluated by a Freedom House -funded report based on user experience from China in 2010, which include Ultrasurf , Hotspot Shield , and Freegate . Tor

1767-411: The anonymity of both parties. Tor is necessary to access these onion services. Because the connection never leaves the Tor network, and is handled by the Tor application on both ends, the connection is always end-to-end encrypted . Onion services were first specified in 2003 and have been deployed on the Tor network since 2004. They are unlisted by design, and can only be discovered on the network if

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1824-503: The application itself, or in how it operates in combination with Tor. E.g., researchers with Inria in 2011 performed an attack on BitTorrent users by attacking clients that established connections both using and not using Tor, then associating other connections shared by the same Tor circuit. When using Tor, applications may still provide data tied to a device, such as information about screen resolution, installed fonts, language configuration, or supported graphics functionality, reducing

1881-440: The attack possible. In November 2014 there was speculation in the aftermath of Operation Onymous , resulting in 17 arrests internationally, that a Tor weakness had been exploited. A representative of Europol was secretive about the method used, saying: "This is something we want to keep for ourselves. The way we do this, we can't share with the whole world, because we want to do it again and again and again." A BBC source cited

1938-747: The boundaries of the Tor network—i.e., the traffic entering and exiting the network. While Tor does provide protection against traffic analysis , it cannot prevent traffic confirmation via end-to-end correlation. There are no documented cases of this limitation being used at scale; as of the 2013 Snowden leaks , law enforcement agencies such as the NSA were unable to perform dragnet surveillance on Tor itself, and relied on attacking other software used in conjunction with Tor, such as vulnerabilities in web browsers . However, targeted attacks have been able to make use of traffic confirmation on individual Tor users, via police surveillance or investigations confirming that

1995-450: The connection is malicious, or trigger geo-blocking . When these defense mechanisms are triggered, it can result in the site blocking access, or presenting captchas to the user. In July of 2014, the Tor Project issued a security advisory for a "relay early traffic confirmation" attack, disclosing the discovery of a group of relays attempting to de-anonymize onion service users and operators. A set of onion service directory nodes (i.e.,

2052-417: The consensus relies on a small number of directory authority nodes voting on current network parameters. Currently, there are nine directory authority nodes, and their health is publicly monitored. The IP addresses of the authority nodes are hard coded into each Tor client. The authority nodes vote every hour to update the consensus, and clients download the most recent consensus on startup. A compromise of

2109-566: The course of its existence, various Tor vulnerabilities have been discovered and occasionally exploited. Attacks against Tor are an active area of academic research that is welcomed by The Tor Project itself. Tor enables its users to surf the Internet, chat and send instant messages anonymously , and is used by a wide variety of people for both licit and illicit purposes. Tor has, for example, been used by criminal enterprises, hacktivism groups, and law enforcement agencies at cross purposes, sometimes simultaneously; likewise, agencies within

2166-589: The destination server. If an application does not add an additional layer of end-to-end encryption between the client and the server, such as Transport Layer Security (TLS, used in HTTPS ) or the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, this allows the exit relay to capture and modify traffic. Attacks from malicious exit relays have recorded usernames and passwords, and modified Bitcoin addresses to redirect transactions. Some of these attacks involved actively removing

2223-539: The development of Internet network technology and associated Computer Sciences research and development. The foundation is a recognized public benefit organization (in Dutch ANBI ) and runs an open call where anyone in the world can submit proposals to improve the Internet, as well as several thematic funds such as the Internet Hardening Fund. Results are made freely available to the community in

2280-463: The entry relays (bridge relays) secret, users can evade Internet censorship that relies upon blocking public Tor relays. Because the IP address of the sender and the recipient are not both in cleartext at any hop along the way, anyone eavesdropping at any point along the communication channel cannot directly identify both ends. Furthermore, to the recipient, it appears that the last Tor node (called

2337-478: The exchange of counterfeit currency ; the black market utilizes the Tor infrastructure, at least in part, in conjunction with Bitcoin. It has also been used to brick IoT devices. In its complaint against Ross William Ulbricht of Silk Road , the US Federal Bureau of Investigation acknowledged that Tor has "known legitimate uses". According to CNET , Tor's anonymity function is "endorsed by

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2394-480: The exit node), rather than the sender, is the originator of the communication. A Tor user's SOCKS -aware applications can be configured to direct their network traffic through a Tor instance's SOCKS interface, which is listening on TCP port 9050 (for standalone Tor) or 9150 (for Tor Browser bundle) at localhost . Tor periodically creates virtual circuits through the Tor network through which it can multiplex and onion-route that traffic to its destination. Once inside

2451-497: The first Internet service provider in The Netherlands. In 1997 the Internet provision services company was acquired by UUnet , which had just become a subsidiary of MFS . MFS was acquired shortly thereafter by Worldcom , which then initiated a takeover bid on MCI and later became a subsidiary of Verizon . The acquisition provided Stichting NLnet with an endowment to transform into a grant-making organization, funding

2508-530: The law. Only criminals have privacy right now, and we need to fix that... So yes, criminals could in theory use Tor, but they already have better options, and it seems unlikely that taking Tor away from the world will stop them from doing their bad things. At the same time, Tor and other privacy measures can fight identity theft, physical crimes like stalking, and so on. Tor aims to conceal its users' identities and their online activity from surveillance and traffic analysis by separating identification and routing. It

2565-412: The majority of the directory authorities could alter the consensus in a way that is beneficial to an attacker. Alternatively, a network congestion attack, such as a DDoS , could theoretically prevent the consensus nodes from communicating, and thus prevent voting to update the consensus (though such an attack would be visible). Tor makes no attempt to conceal the IP addresses of exit relays, or hide from

2622-652: The name EUnet . NLnet was the main node of the EUnet operating out of the Netherlands national center for mathematics and computer science CWI , and played a vital role in spreading first UUCP and later the ARPAnet throughout Europe, earning Hagen and other pioneers a place in the Internet Hall of Fame . NLnet also pioneered the world's first dial-in and ISDN infrastructure with full country coverage by using

2679-556: The onion address is already known, though a number of sites and services do catalog publicly known onion addresses. Popular sources of .onion links include Pastebin , Twitter , Reddit , other Internet forums , and tailored search engines. While onion services are often discussed in terms of websites, they can be used for any TCP service, and are commonly used for increased security or easier routing to non-web services, such as secure shell remote login, chat services such as IRC and XMPP , or file sharing . They have also become

2736-505: The prevalence of digital media in contemporary online life. Along with SecureDrop , Tor is used by news organizations such as The Guardian , The New Yorker , ProPublica and The Intercept to protect the privacy of whistleblowers. In March 2015, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology released a briefing which stated that "There is widespread agreement that banning online anonymity systems altogether

2793-781: The projects that NLnet supports or has supported are DNSSEC , the ODF plugfest , the GPL V3 license drafting process, Tor anonymity network , the Parrot virtual machine , Namecoin , Jitsi , nftables , and Libre-SOC . NLnet's history started in April 1982 with the announcement by Teus Hagen as chairman of a major initiative by the European Unix Users Group (EUUG) to develop and provide network services in Europe under

2850-491: The public Internet can be subject to correlation attacks, and all onion services are susceptible to misconfigured services (e.g., identifying information included by default in web server error responses), leaking uptime and downtime statistics, intersection attacks, or various user errors. The OnionScan program, written by independent security researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis , comprehensively examines onion services for such flaws and vulnerabilities. The main implementation of Tor

2907-424: The request, and the IP address of the client requesting it (where the requesting client could be a visitor or owner of the onion service). The attacking nodes joined the network on 30 January, using a Sybil attack to comprise 6.4% of guard relay capacity, and were removed on 4 July. In addition to removing the attacking relays, the Tor application was patched to prevent the specific traffic modifications that made

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2964-431: The set of users a connection could possibly originate from, or uniquely identifying them. This information is known as the device fingerprint , or browser fingerprint in the case of web browsers. Applications implemented with Tor in mind, such as Tor Browser, can be designed to minimize the amount of information leaked by the application and reduce its fingerprint. Tor cannot encrypt the traffic between an exit relay and

3021-541: The signal wiring from the Netherlands rail system owned by Nederlandse Spoorwegen . NLnet was one of the founders of the AMS-ix foundation and the .nl registry SIDN. Stichting NLnet was formally established as a Stichting (Dutch for foundation) in February 1989. In November 1994 Stichting NLnet created NLnet BV (a Dutch Limited liability corporation or BV ) as a commercial operating subsidiary and so incorporated

3078-622: The state of Maryland on 4 charges: distributing; conspiring to distribute; and advertising child pornography, as well as aiding and abetting advertising of child pornography. The FBI acknowledged the attack in a 12 September 2013 court filing in Dublin ; further technical details from a training presentation leaked by Edward Snowden revealed the code name for the exploit as "EgotisticalGiraffe". In 2022, Kaspersky researchers found that when looking up "Tor Browser" in Chinese on YouTube , one of

3135-937: The web". It has been targeted by the American National Security Agency and the British GCHQ signals intelligence agencies, albeit with marginal success, and more successfully by the British National Crime Agency in its Operation Notarise. At the same time, GCHQ has been using a tool named "Shadowcat" for "end-to-end encrypted access to VPS over SSH using the Tor network". Tor can be used for anonymous defamation, unauthorized news leaks of sensitive information, copyright infringement , distribution of illegal sexual content, selling controlled substances , weapons, and stolen credit card numbers, money laundering , bank fraud, credit card fraud , identity theft and

3192-563: Was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson , and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, to protect American intelligence communications online. Onion routing is implemented by means of encryption in the application layer of the communication protocol stack, nested like the layers of an onion . The alpha version of Tor, developed by Syverson and computer scientists Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson and then called The Onion Routing project (which

3249-484: Was later given the acronym "Tor"), was launched on 20 September 2002. The first public release occurred a year later. In 2004, the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free license, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) began funding Dingledine and Mathewson to continue its development. In 2006, Dingledine, Mathewson, and five others founded The Tor Project ,

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