Tor is not secure

[Mok-Kong Shen]

It's pure chance coincidence that exactly one year ago (04.07.2013)
I sent to comp.security.misc, alt.anonymous and a few other Usenet
groups a post entitled "Remailers and similar systems are not secure".

There was in the past 2 days a bit furore in German news media about
NSA's attack on a server of Tor-Network run by a German computer
science student. See also:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/XKeyscore-Quellcode-Tor-Nutzer-werden-von-der-NSA-als-Extremisten-markiert-und-ueberwacht-2248328.html.


But Tor, as I argued earlier, in principle can't offer genuine
anonymity, which is unfortunately not well-known not only to the common
people but seemingly also to quite some people who "should" know
something essential about IT security (noting that the student running
the Tor server studies CS).

M. K. Shen

[Mok-Kong Shen]

BTW, if someone would put up a conspiracy theory saying that remailers
etc. are purposedly created by secret agencies in order to be able to
easier and more efficiently spot their objects, I would highly doubt
that such a theory could be easily refuted.

M. K. Shen

[Mok-Kong Shen]

Following a hint of someone in another group, I found in
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(Netzwerk) a reference to a
Tor Annual Report, according to which in year 2012 60% of the
financial support came from US government sources.

M. K. Shen