A recent study on the possibility of discovering the identity of anonymous network users Tor (The Onion Router) has caused quite a stir in the online community. So much so that the developers of the project issued a statement to calm things down by stating that the rate of false positives makes attacks this kind of junk.
The study was issued after six years of research by Professor Sambuddah Chakravarty of the Indraprastha Institute of Informatics, from New Delhi. In short, the professor reports that the 81% of the IP addresses of the Tor network users can be revealed through traffic analysis collected by Cisco routers through NetFlow technology. You can find the research 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 the flow patterns of traffic entering and leaving the network Tor. The data from NetFlow has not been refined enough, and to balance this disadvantage, the type of attack proposed by the researcher requires a server that is controlled by the attacker and "introduces deterministic disturbances to the traffic of anonymous visitors."
This could be part of the plan of a government, or an agency monitorings, which is designed to observe traffic passing through Tor network servers at various points. The other view, which comes from the developer of the Tor Project, states that users 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 proverb, "if you do not glorify your house, it will fall on you."
