Full Disclosure mailing list archives

Re: Is there a way to trace back Tor user


From: Bruno Wolff III <bruno () wolff to>
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 14:14:43 -0500

On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 09:33:12 -0400,
  Brendan Dolan-Gavitt <mooyix () gmail com> wrote:
This is covered in the Tor FAQ:
http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#head-a79d22244cc04ca5472832cbcc315198b875f34c

The best attack that I know of right know involves measuring latency to each
Tor node and correlating that with transmissions at the destination server.
The latency goes up on those nodes carrying the traffic to the destination
server when that server is transmitting data, allowing the attacker to
determine the path through Tor (though not the original source of the
traffic). See "Low-Cost Traffic Analysis of Tor" for more details:

There can be other attacks in special cases. Tor users are rare and if you
know some other information about them (like that they are a user on your
network) then it might not be too hard to figure out who they are.

I used this idea a long time ago to figure out who sent an anonymous threat
to one of our users through anon.penet.fi remailer. They were the only
user on our system to have sent email to that remailer at a time close to
when the threat message was received.

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