The Ethical Hacker Network - Tor: Anonymity Online

don

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Tor: Anonymity Online

« on: March 11, 2007, 11:24:14 PM »

Was chatting about Tor just now, and it hit me that we don't have this listed in our tools board. So here we go...

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Tor: anonymity online

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.

Tor aims to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers called onion routers, protecting you from websites that build profiles of your interests, local eavesdroppers that read your data or learn what sites you visit, and even the onion routers themselves.

Tor's security is improved as its user base grows and as more people volunteer to run servers. Please consider volunteering your time or volunteering your bandwidth. And remember that this is development code—it's not a good idea to rely on the current Tor network if you really need strong anonymity.

http://tor.eff.org/

Don


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nebu10uz

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Re: Tor: Anonymity Online

« Reply #1 on: March 12, 2007, 08:03:10 AM »

Interesting topic related to Tor:

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HD Moore, the lead developer of the Metasploit Project, has created a rough set of tools that allows anyone operating a Tor server to attempt to track the source of network data.

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The Tor Project has already taken steps to inform its users. On Thursday, the project added a warning to its documentation and further outlined what users need to do to protect their anonymity online.

"Tor by itself is NOT all you need to maintain your anonymity," the site read. "There are several major pitfalls to watch out for."

The list of threats is not small: misconfigured applications, using any of a number of browser plugins, visiting sites that have set cookies, and a lack of encryption from the Tor network to the destination server.

If nothing else, the list underscores that, in the digital world, anonymity is not easy.

For complete story refer to the following link:

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11447


« Last Edit: March 12, 2007, 08:05:24 AM by blackazarro »	Logged

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Negrita

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Re: Tor: Anonymity Online

« Reply #2 on: March 12, 2007, 03:55:04 PM »

Now we don't want to forget the FoxTor Firefox web broser plug-in, do we?
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3606/
I've found that using FoxTor is much faster than with regular Tor/Privoxy/Vidalia, though it will only supply privacy for web browsing.


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CEH, CCSA NG/AI, NNCSS, MCP, MCSA 2003

There are 10 kinds of people, those that understand binary, and those that don't.

Kev

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Re: Tor: Anonymity Online

« Reply #3 on: March 12, 2007, 04:29:25 PM »

I still feel Tor offers a reasonable amount of protection for normal day to day browsing if you follow their guidelines. Don’t forget to disable java in your browser, especially if you go to hacking sites!


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LSOChris

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Re: Tor: Anonymity Online

« Reply #4 on: March 12, 2007, 04:52:43 PM »

dang HD Moore is just dropping stuff! they also just released the first php exploit for MSF way cool.

on the TOR subject, its interesting that he created that project, of course in this day and age until the source is released i would consider my TOR connection still useful for what its designed for...


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jimbob

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Re: Tor: Anonymity Online

« Reply #5 on: March 14, 2007, 04:24:20 AM »

Quote from: Kev on March 12, 2007, 04:29:25 PM

I still feel Tor offers a reasonable amount of protection for normal day to day browsing if you follow their guidelines. Don’t forget to disable Java in your browser, especially if you go to hacking sites!

Just some quick thoughts. Embedded Java applets run in a sandbox and can only connect to the host from which they are served. I'm not sure if they have to honour the browser's proxy settings so they may be able to 'phone home' and give up your real IP address. I'm pretty sure that Shockwave/Flash applets don't suffer so many restrictions so they may be able to do this and more.

Disabling scripting ought to fix this, but as anyone who has done this knows half the interweb stops working if you disable JavaScript. What would be nice would be a NoScript like plugin that allows you to enable or disable content plugins on a per-site basis. Taking a quick look at my plugin list there's nothing there that would break more than about 5% of the web sites out there if they were removed.

Jimbob


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