A recent study on the possibility of discovering the 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 by analyzing the traffic collected by Cisco routers through technology NetFlow. You can find the survey On the Effectiveness of Traffic 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 one serviceς παρακολούθησης, που έχει σχεδιαστεί για την παρατήρηση της κίνησης που διέρχεται από τους διακομιστές του δικτύου Tοr σε διάφορα 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."
