The Onion Router

[BallAquatics]

If any of you have been following Edward Snowden...

... you might be interested in TOR  https://www.torproject.org/

There's also this on NPR  http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/05/25/315821415/going-dark-the-internet-behind-the-internet

Dennis

[Mugwump]

I've been following most of it too....and there's even more too it than shown here......I keep flashing to '1984' every time I read/see things about what he exposed.

[BillT]

I was not surprised by Edward Snowden's exposures.
When the patriot act was passed, I started not having any faith in the security of the phones or internet from govt snooping.

When the opportunity for a secretive govt agency to set-up up something like that it seems naive to not expect those powers to abused (probably for a perceived good, but abused nevertheless).

[BallAquatics]

Well I've downloaded and installed the TOR bundle on both Windoze & Linux.  A fairly painless way to get total anonymity on-line.

It's rather humorus to read that the US Navy developed TOR, but then realized if they were the only ones using it they wouldn't go undetected on the Internet as everyone who saw the software being used would realize it was a Navy transmission.  That was the reason it was released to the public, with thousands of users running the software, they all can achieve total anonymity on-line.....

Dennis

[Mugwump]

MIT Researchers Devise New Anonymity Network Following Tor Bug

Computer scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a new anonymity network they say is more secure than Tor.

For the uninitiated, anonymity networks like Tor let you hide your location and Web activity, offering people living under repressive regimes, for instance, protection from prying eyes monitoring their Internet use. But following the recent discovery of vulnerabilities in Tor, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the ?cole Polytechnique F?d?rale de Lausanne have been working on a more secure anonymity scheme. Now they say they have succeeded.

The researchers plan to present the new system, dubbed Riffle, at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium later this month in Darmstadt, Germany. They say it leverages several existing cryptographic techniques, but combines them in a new way.

Riffle relies on a series of servers (known collectively as mixnet), each of which "permutes the order in which it receives messages before passing them on to the next," according to a news release. So, if "for instance, messages from senders Alice, Bob, and Carol reach the first server in the order A, B, C, that server would send them to the second server in a different order ? say, C, B, A. The second server would permute them before sending them to the third, and so on." As a result, someone tracking the messages would have no idea which was which by the time they exited the last server.

Like Tor, the system also uses onion encryption, wrapping each message in several layers of protection. On top of this, Riffle uses technique called verifiable shuffle to thwart tampering and prevent adversaries from infiltrating servers with their own code ? a problem affecting other anonymity networks. Finally, it takes advantage of yet another technique, called authentication encryption, to verify the authenticity of an encrypted message.



http://www.pcmag.com/news/345994/mit-researchers-devise-new-anonymity-network-following-tor-b

[BallAquatics]

Sounds interesting.  We have Edward Snowden to thank for all the activity in this area.  Google got so fired up that they recommend ALL website use HTTPS connections.

Dennis

[sschind]

you got me here under false pretenses Dennis.  I was hoping to see a new power tool for sculpting aromatic vegetables

[BallAquatics]

you got me here under false pretenses Dennis.  I was hoping to see a new power tool for sculpting aromatic vegetables

LOL   

Dennis