Tor Network: Anonymous Surfing

"Tor is an anonymity network" is the claim of the Tor . The idea behind Tor network is to hide the IP address of the originator, so that it is not possible to trace who is sending the traffic. If the traffic passing through the network is in clear text, this does not provide security to data content. Here are details of how it works.

Basically if used correctly Tor technology works for its intended purpose i.e. anonymity only if traffic is encrypted end to end. If traffic entering and leaving the Tor network is in clear, then hiding IP address is pointless because identity could be easily revealed by reading the content. Security researcher Don Egerstad sniffed the traffic passing through the Tor network and exposed hundreds of sensitive emails and passwords, many of those belonging to different governments.

Clearly, people using the Tor network do not understand the threat model. It is mind numbing to think that many of the world's governments are using this network without realizing what they are doing. Perhaps, exposure of this network is a setback to Intelligence community who had a potential goldmine of information from traffic flowing through this network. Or perhaps not, people who are ignorant enough to use this network, may not have even followed the news reports of this exposure and may still be using it as before.

The lesson for us mortals from this incident is that do not be an early adopter of a new security technology without understanding its implications. Security is hard to get right and there are too many ways to compromise it. Focusing solely on one aspect of security could be disastrous. Security has to be looked as a whole and threat model must be properly understood instead of using an ad-hoc method. Ad-hoc solutions for security are a recipe for disaster.