Use the one they’re using: Tor.
There’s a long list of reasons why you might not want to use it though.
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db2@lemmy.world 2 months agoWhich one is good against nation states? Asking for a friend.
henfredemars@infosec.pub 2 months ago
13262483@lemmy.wtf 2 months ago
By default, Tor doesn’t protect you from nation states. It’s a start, but you have to be an intelligent user who understands statistics to have some protection from nation states.
Let’s assume there’s two teams, because in geopolitics, it seems like we divide into “west” and “east.” Let’s assume team 1 controls 10% [1] of the relays, they have more than enough budget to pay for the entire network 100x over. That means, on entry, there’s a 10% probability that you will land on their entry node.
Now, to do traffic analysis, they need you to also land on their exit. The probability of that is also 10% in the example. In other words, 10% of the time that you have their entry, you will also have their exit. (or, for 1 in every 100 circuits, you will have a compromised circuit) If you use Tor everyday for a year, you’ll likely have a fucked circuit at least once. If you use something like Whonix that spawns like 10-20 circuits at start, you’ll have a compromised circuit weekly.
A compromised circuit isn’t the end of the world. Most internet traffic today uses end to end encryption, [2] so as long as the service is outside of team 1’s jurisdiction, your communications are safe… but team 1 knows who you are, and that you are talking to someone they don’t trust. If it’s in their jurisdiction, they can get a warrant, and they can fully de-anonymize the traffic between the service that you were using.
All of this is to say, it’s hard to stay in the dark if your adversary is information intelligence. The best way to stay invisible is to use the network as infrequently as possible, and to make the time correlation very far off. (Use custom relays that delay when the traffic travels so that traffic analysis like this example is not possible)
By the way, in the US, the NSA has multiple sites where they copy the traffic on the backbone for analysis. They’re performing some deep packet analysis. These systems are going to improve in the future with machine learning. As an example, in China, it’s not exactly simple to connect to Tor as some methods of concealing Tor traffic result in detection from machine learning that they’re performing on all traffic.
[1] This is a hypothetical. They could control 0%, 5%, 25%, etc. It’s publicly unknown how much they control or if they try to control the network at all.
[2] Be careful with your assumptions about https. Where are the root authorities? Why should we trust them? It’s better security to never trust them.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Fascinating. Thank goodness my life doesn’t depend on that kind of threat modeling.
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
They don’t actually need to control the entrance nodes if they control the ISP. You can track TCP fingerprints through Tor with just exit nodes
Nfamwap@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Go on
henfredemars@infosec.pub 2 months ago
Biggest problem is that it’s free. That means you’ve got very little bandwidth that’s usable since it’s being supplied out of generosity for no direct compensation that could be reinvested into the network. There’s just too many users and not enough bandwidth.
And because it actually works, it’s very difficult or impossible to police how it’s used. That means your precious bits are just as important as the 100,000 spam emails that another user is trying to send with the service.
Finally, you might not want to use it because you’re sharing the same exit nodes with many other users. This means services tend to block those IP addresses outright, limiting what you can use it for, and if you leak and identify such as your name maybe you don’t want that tied to an IP address that actual terrorists might have used.
I write this as someone who owns a bunch of official Tor merchandise.
db2@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Spam emails are about the tamest dark part of the dark web though…
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
The solar powered RPI jump box you installed on a telephone pole outside the McDonald’s.
db2@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Who told you about that?
That is… I don’t know what you mean…
Itsamelemmy@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
If you need to ask, you probably don’t know enough to keep yourself anonymous. But it starts with tails, tor and not doing anything stupid like reusing user names that you use on the clear web or signing into something like Facebook. If a nation state has reason to find out who you are, they most likely will. All it takes is one little mistake that you most likely didn’t even know was a mistake.