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this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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What I'm talking about wrt tor is traffic shaping or node DoS leading to a Sybil attack. When the (state)actor has the ability to drop all packets from you to NON attacker-controlled guard nodes, and then once you're connected to a dirty guard, drop all connections to non-controlled relay and exit nodes, it's done. There's also an ongoing DoS attack that is able to make any guard/entry/relay/exit use 100% CPU making them unusable and it's been going on for months now. You can see it on the tor forums (relay-operators) and someone posted about it in more detail on the monero subreddit the other day.
Oh, yeah, I've been seeing that a lot of it has been really dragging for, like, the last year or so.
Yes, if a state-level actor is able to get control of all the nodes, then everyone is pretty much fucked. I suppose that, with enough nodes, you could make that kind of attack really, really hard. I'm also guessing that Monero transactions are taking a really long time right now to go through? I saw that the Finnish (?) gov't claimed to have 'broken' Monero, but they're not giving any technical information about their claims, and most current speculation is that they busted the guy doing other shit that they were able to trace link to Monero transactions. (I don't really keep up with Monero; last I knew, there wasn't a good wallet that didn't require downloading the whole blockchain, and my home internet is slooooooooooooow.)
It's not even a matter of gaining control of nodes, they can simply blackhole your access to good nodes so you end up with nodes controlled by them. Easy but loud, although it seems to be what's going on in a number of cases, and not many people are talking about it. Tor used to alert you to this, but now it's quietly tucked away into a log file. There are other vulnerabilities present in tor and the tor project devs don't seem particularly interested in them, with the DoS attacks requiring the community itself to step in with hacky solutions. I'm of the mind (never would have found myself saying this) that the tor project at large is compromised.
Monero is currently being hit by a (likely) black marble attack which is why it's so slow. They're basically flooding transactions (1/3 to 2/3 of all transactions able to be processed at any given time) so that the anonymity that makes monero work is severely degraded. Whether it breaks past transactions remains to be seen, but it absolutely weakens the anonymity of transactions done during (possibly shortly before and after) the attacks.