A recent study related to the possibility of its discovery identity of anonymous network users Tor (The Onion Router) has caused a lot of "turmoil" in the online community. So much so that the project developers issued a statement to calm things down, stating that the percentage of false positives makes such attacks useless.
The study was published after six years of research by Professor Sambuddah Chakravarty of the Indraprastha Institute of Informatics, New Delhi. In short, the professor reports that 81% of Tor network users' IP addresses can be revealed through analysisher movementς που συλλέγεται από τα routers της Cisco μέσω της τεχνολογίας NetFlow. Μπορείτε να βρείτε την έρευνα On the Effectiveness of Traffic Analysis Against Anonymity Networks Using Flow Records, here (PDF).
Chakravarty said that under laboratory conditions he was able to uncover all anonymous addresses. When the technique was tested under real conditions, the accuracy was reduced to 81,4% and a false positive 12,2% was recorded.
The percentage of false positive results was 6,4%. According to Roger Dingledine, developer of the Tor project, this value is extremely important, because it shows that on a large scale, the whole attack looks like someone is looking for a needle in a haystack. Thus he claims that the attack is ineffective.
The Chakravarty project is based on identifying similarities in traffic flow patterns entering and leaving the Tor network. The data from NetFlow has not been perfected enough, and to balance this drawback, the type of attack proposed by the researcher requires a server controlled by the intruder and "introduces deterministic disturbances in the traffic of anonymous visitors."
This could be part of a government's plan, or a surveillance agency, designed to observe traffic passing through the Tor network's servers at various points. The other view coming from the developer of the Tor Project, states that the users they still have no reason to fear that their identities can be revealed when using Tor.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but there is a well-known saying, "if you don't praise it home it will fall on you."
