On Fri, 2017-10-13 at 17:42 +0300, Nazar Mokrynskyi wrote:
> This is why I thought it might be useful to find a common ground one level 
> below Tor and have a few different protocols like Tor on top of it, without 
> re-implementing interfaces/properties that are common for many anonymous 
> networks.

Afaik, there is nothing "useful" to do with protocols that are "like tor
but not tor" because tor appears general enough to do anything you
really want with circuit-based anonymity protocols.  

Research is an exception of course, but most alternatives like I2P or
HORNET sound like a step backwards.

> > Tor recently redesigned their rendezvous protocol for hidden services.
> I my context it would be entirely P2P without directory authorities,

Right now, there is no known way to do this safely.  I2P does it, but
afaik not safely.  I donno if it's worse than using circuits in the
first place though. 

GNUNet's RPS system is an improvement on some good ideas from the P2P
literature, but it's only a start, not designed for anonymity systems,
and any real solution requires much more work before it might
become suitable. 

>  so there is a need for a different way of choosing introduction points. But 
> this is above Ronion's responsibilities, so a bit out of scope of this thread.

Initiating a connection is usually considered to be part of the basic
protocol, otherwise you cannot really do anything. 

> and on top of that multi-layer non-authenticated encryption between hops.

It needs to be a AEZ or another wide block cipher.

> So in current design if you corrupt a couple of bytes somewhere in the middle 
> of the process, nodes in routing path (think circuit) will just forward 
> corrupted packet until it reaches responder (last node in routing path, not 
> necessary receiver) and will be discarded.
> This will corrupt the state of the routing path after recipient if recipient 
> is not responder node, but assuming that most if not all of the traffic is 
> targeted at responder, state will remain consistent and I'm not really sure 
> what is so catastrophic here.

If you do not use AEZ, then one can produce cryptographic proof of a
hidden service's identity:  Just Run a hidden service guard that xors a
pattern into the data.  And run a receiver that recognizes that
pattern.  

Tor might exhibit this problem too, not sure about their malleability.
I do know Tor wants to migrate to a wide-block cipher, but they might be
waiting on DJB, et al. to release HHFHFH instead of using AEZ.

> Also you can send garbage most of the time on the higher level,

This might be useless if you are using circuits.

Jeff


Attachment: signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part

_______________________________________________
Messaging mailing list
[email protected]
https://moderncrypto.org/mailman/listinfo/messaging

Reply via email to