“Our results also show that against a single AS adversary roughly 100% of users in some common locations are deanonymized within three months.” “Our analysis,” says the report, “shows that 80% of all types of users may be deanonymized by a relatively moderate Tor-relay adversary within six months.” It gets worse. The results will concern those who use Tor to mask their internet behavior – whether they’re individuals trying to avoid surveillance on principle, journalists trying to protect sources, political dissidents, or the use of anonymity for illegal purposes. What the new paper does is provide “an analysis framework for evaluating the security of various user behaviors on the live Tor network and show how to concretely apply this framework by performing a comprehensive evaluation of the security of the Tor network against the threat of complete deanonymization.” This data combined with traffic patterns makes it possible to identify both the user and his destination. It has long been known that Tor is vulnerable to an adversary able to observe traffic entering and leaving the anonymity network.

In fact, if a single user regularly uses Tor over an extended length of time, it is almost certain that he can be ‘de-anonymized.’ Now Syverson has worked with Aaron Johnson, Chris Wacek, Rob Jansen and Micah Sherr to show that Tor is not as secure as its users might hope. In 2002, Syverson collaborated with Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson to develop Tor itself, which has since spun off into the Tor Project Inc.

The concept was originally developed as a means for traffic-secure communications by David Goldschlag, Michael Reed and Paul Syverson at the Naval Research Laboratory in the mid 1990s. Tor - the onion router – is a method of using the internet with anonymity.

Reddit is tor safe 2016