Even if it is an old discussion, it isn't going away. And no, snailmail
expectations and constant bandwidth do not make it all just work. The
web is not snailmail.
Also you missed the first line of my post:
[...] "The problem is user expectations, or perhaps perceptions of user
expectations."
While I doubt many people would consider a couple of days a suitable
response time for a web browser in an online world (except perhaps
complaints departments), some others might, and it is often what you are
used to.
Whether the theory/code creators were right in assuming that 5 seconds
was necessary - well it's either 5 seconds or much longer and more
covertraffic for real anonymity.
But TOR was supposed to be a web browser, and long response times are
not part of that world.
TOR however took up much of the interest in anonymous communications, to
the detriment of other options like Mixminion and the later ones.
As far as the NSA was/is concerned, the situation now is perfect - 'most
everybody uses a system which we can break and most other people can't.
I'm not saying that the NSA actually thought that, and arranged the
government finance for TOR, but if I had been at NSA that's what I would
have done.
As to constant bandwidth/covertraffic, that is expensive even today. For
constant bandwidth to get a 5 second response time for a smallish say
3MB web page you need to have 3 MB of covertraffic every 5 seconds, or
50GB per day, per link. Ouch.
Peter Fairbrother
On 05/06/2023 16:35, Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor
of Many wrote:
At one of the PET workshops {these discussed much of the academic
background to the technology behind TOR, Mixminion etc} someone
presented a paper on how long a user would wait for a reply to a web
request. Up jumps an attendee who says he and some colleagues had
already done a paper on this, and the answer was 5 seconds. Ooops.
Now for a 5 second maximum response time it is technologically
infeasable to implement an untrusted onion network which resists attack
by a global persistent threat like the NSA or GCHQ.The APT just
temporally correlates data exiting the endpoints.
The network can introduce timing jitter and packet size standardisation
or variation in order to make this harder, but with cost-limited dummy
traffic and a maximum 5 seconds response time it can't reliably stop it.
It cain't be done.
This is such an old discussion that I am also not up to date on, but I
don't see why snail mail and constant bandwidth were not effective
counterarguments to user expectations and timing correlation.
