Tor Anonymity Breached

Packet Storm Security has released a paper (PDF) revealing how to track who Tor users really are. Tor allows anonymous web browsing by redirecting traffic through a series of intermediaries with the final request handled by an exit router.

The key tenet of Tor is that it should protect anonymity and the reader's analysis pointed not only to traffic modification on the part of a so-called "exit router" (the last hop in a Tor circuit before your packets reach the real destination) but also an attempt at tracking the true origin of the traffic (in a Tor network a hop only knows that the traffic comes from a previous hop but no futher back).

The authors recommends turning off Flash, ActiveX, Javascript, and Java to protect your anonymity. It also wouldn't hurt to use a text-based browser like Lynx.

(via Download Squad)

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