![]() The Tor Project website has an excellent explanation of why Tor doesn't help criminals very much. Journalists use it to do research on stories and communicate securely with sources. Families use Tor to protect their children and preserve their privacy. The military uses it for secure communications and planning. Activists use it to circumvent censorship and provide anonymity. This is simply not true! There are many types of people that use Tor. One of the most common misconceptions we hear is that Tor is only used by criminals and pedophiles. The best attacks on Tor are side-channel attacks on browser bugs or user misconfiguration and traffic correlation attacks. We can conclude from this that Tor has probably not been broken at a cryptographic level. Its design does assume that at least one side of the connection isn't being monitored by whomever you're trying to stay private from. Firefox was patched quickly, and no major exploits for Firefox affecting Tor users appear to have been found since.Īs the Tor developers noted in 2004, if someone is actively monitoring both your network traffic and the network traffic of the Internet service you're communicating with, Tor can't prevent them from deducing that you're talking to that service. The FBI-possibly in conjunction with the NSA-was able to find one serious exploit for Firefox that lead to the takedown of Freedom Hosting and exploit of its users. Historically this has been done by finding an exploit for the Tor Browser Bundle or by exploiting a user that has misconfigured Tor. They have been able to compromise certain Tor users in specific situations. ![]() According to the NSA "Tor Stinks" slides revealed by the Guardian last year, the NSA is still not able to completely circumvent the anonymity provided by Tor. One of the many things that we learned from the NSA leaks is that Tor still works. We would like to take this opportunity to dispel some of these common myths and misconceptions. But it appears that there are still some popular misconceptions about Tor. Since we started our Tor Challenge two weeks ago we have signed up over 1000 new Tor relays. We posted last week about the Tor Challenge and why everyone should use Tor. ![]() Updated: July 1st at 6:30PM to add information about traffic correlation attacks.
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