Sunday, January 8, 2017

Catching the TOR user

If you download and install TOR (The Onion Router) it will tell you that the use of TOR is not all you need to protect your identity. However, for most users of TOR it is pretty effective.

The most important things are to change your Internet habits, these are described in detail on the TOR website. My discussion here relates to some of the more technical issues relating to how a TOR user can be still detected. Luckily for most users this threat is only applicable if an agency such as a Nation State is carrying out surveillance on suspected terrorists and criminals.

This subject is particularly topical today when GCHQ are saying that they had detected the Russians as they were hacking into the US DNC.

To be able to determine the routing and the signature of the data being transferred over a connection made with TOR would require a considerable amount of resources. These resources are only really available to organisations that have access to the Internet backbone and are able to monitor the traffic through know TOR nodes. This fact is confirmed by agencies such as the USA's NSA who admit that they have a problem with TOR The NSA program codenamed EgotisticalGiraffe describes how they propose tracking the TOR user.

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