No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Yes, but with the amount of darknet markets and CSAM hidden services that have been taken down within a relatively short span of time compared to the last decade of tor's more widespread history, it seems they may have a new vulnerability (or perhaps just a new covert post-snowden-acceptance surveillance court ruling) that allows them to identify hidden services real IP addresses. It's speculation, but they wouldn't use it bluntly or everyone would know there was a vulnerability and thousands more eyes would be on the tor code (or awareness of nation-state level traffic omniscience in the case of something as simple as a timing attack). A CSAM hidden service has been run by the federal governments of a few countries, so there's no question of ethics or law in that case.
The "users" are probably the weak point. Badly configured setups leaking info, aggregation using that info to fingerprint a user, etc. When they have a user account with access they can use it to keep collecting data and digging. I imagine it's a slow process. Nothing networked can be 100% secure though.
Edit: I'm not sure why I stayed up typing this. Maybe someone will read this comment and learn something.
I am speaking more specifically about hidden service server compromise, happening via court order if possible once the IP address is obtained through technical (not opsec issue, but perhaps parallel reconstruction) means.
Just in the last year (most last 2-4 months).. after tor DoS was 'more fixed' with PoW mind you.. teams of government agencies have seized the following hidden services and or taken down of the teams behind them: LockBit, Hive, Blackcat/ALPHV, Ragnar, Genesis Market, xDedic, Kingdom Market, Piilopuoti, Qakbot, Skynet Market, ChipMixer, and the list goes on. I didn't even mention all the CSAM and drug related seizures. Those are only ransomware, fraud and drug markets.
But yes /.env, /.well-known, /server-status, not verifying server ssh hash with password login in an amnesiac operating system, not running an amnesiac operating system and having multiple ssh keys (remember that GitLab fiasco)... All OPSEC mistakes an intermediate operator c(w)ould make.
I agree 80% of it is user error and plain and simple OPSEC mistakes. SANS teaches a course on darknet OSINT and there are plenty of FOSS OSINT projects.
But tor is not foolproof even with perfect OPSEC and state actors are constantly finding ways to weaken or break it. An adversary with global passive network capabilities can and will defeat tor anonymity, as the tor projects admits itself.
Recently, there was almost a full year-long denial of service attack against tor and i2p, and it was likely a state actor identifying tor users and hidden services. Force enough connection resets, knock good guard nodes offline, and soon enough you know who's who and where they're connecting to with a little traffic shaping. Thankfully there is work being done to identify bad actors (PDF warning) but it IS being done.
There is much ongoing work to unmask tor users and hidden services...
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/271828/impact-of-deep-learning-based-flow-correlation-on-tor
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/TIGER%3A-Tor-Traffic-Generator-for-Realistic-Lopes-Castro/f3239ef7cb3d332b96b39bad879fa7b81bbda215
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-99-7356-9_22
https://wurzel.io/Deanon-Murmur
https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3618257.3624997
Of course there is work being done to enhance tor at the same time.
https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-proof-of-work-defense-for-onion-services/
https://restoreprivacy.com/torkameleon-strengthening-tor-against-deanonymization-attacks/