Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

September 18, 2017

Darkening the Dark Web

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Privacy,Security,Tor — Patrick Durusau @ 8:47 pm

I encountered Andy Greenberg‘s post, It’s About to Get Even Easier to Hide on the Dark Web (20 January 2017), and was happy to read:

From the post:


The next generation of hidden services will use a clever method to protect the secrecy of those addresses. Instead of declaring their .onion address to hidden service directories, they’ll instead derive a unique cryptographic key from that address, and give that key to Tor’s hidden service directories. Any Tor user looking for a certain hidden service can perform that same derivation to check the key and route themselves to the correct darknet site. But the hidden service directory can’t derive the .onion address from the key, preventing snoops from discovering any secret darknet address. “The Tor network isn’t going to give you any way to learn about an onion address you don’t already know,” says Mathewson.

The result, Mathewson says, will be darknet sites with new, stealthier applications. A small group of collaborators could, for instance, host files on a computer known to only to them. No one else could ever even find that machine, much less access it. You could host a hidden service on your own computer, creating a way to untraceably connect to it from anywhere in the world, while keeping its existence secret from snoops. Mathewson himself hosts a password-protected family wiki and calendar on a Tor hidden service, and now says he’ll be able to do away with the site’s password protection without fear of anyone learning his family’s weekend plans. (Tor does already offer a method to make hidden services inaccessible to all but certain Tor browsers, but it involves finicky changes to the browser’s configuration files. The new system, Mathewson says, makes that level of secrecy far more accessible to the average user.)

The next generation of hidden services will also switch from using 1024-bit RSA encryption keys to shorter but tougher-to-crack ED-25519 elliptic curve keys. And the hidden service directory changes mean that hidden service urls will change, too, from 16 characters to 50. But Mathewson argues that change doesn’t effect the dark web addresses’ usability since they’re already too long to memorize.

Your wait to test these new features for darkening the dark web are over!

Tor 0.3.2.1-alpha is released, with support for next-gen onion services and KIST scheduler

From the post:

And as if all those other releases today were not enough, this is also the time for a new alpha release series!

Tor 0.3.2.1-alpha is the first release in the 0.3.2.x series. It includes support for our next-generation (“v3”) onion service protocol, and adds a new circuit scheduler for more responsive forwarding decisions from relays. There are also numerous other small features and bugfixes here.

You can download the source from the usual place on the website. Binary packages should be available soon, with an alpha Tor Browser likely by the end of the month.

Remember: This is an alpha release, and it’s likely to have more bugs than usual. We hope that people will try it out to find and report bugs, though.

The Vietnam War series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick makes it clear the United States government lies and undertakes criminal acts for reasons hidden from the public. To trust any assurance by that government of your privacy, freedom of speech, etc., is an act of madness.

Will you volunteer to help with the Tor project or place your confidence in government?

It really is that simple.

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