Researchers build new Tor client called ‘Astoria’ to evade NSA snooping

Astoria, a new Tor anonymiser network client built by Researchers specifically to evade NSA snooping

It has become very hard to keep internet anonymous, as the NSA is doing everything in its ability to keep a check on internet activity. The hackers which have the full force and backing of Beijing, London, and Washington, D.C. are anonymity’s toughest opponents. People have been using the anonymizing network, Tor to protect their anonymity. Tor was generally used to enter dark web sites like Silk Road, but it can also be used for good.

With NSA, the powerful intelligence agency’s danger appearing large, a new Tor client called Astoria have been created specifically by the researchers to make it difficult to secretly listen to a conversation for the world’s aggressive, most richest, and most capable spies.

Tor, the world’s most popular anonymity network, makes user data anonymous by adding the extra step of overwhelming defeating a user’s signal through different entry and exit relays. This allows a website to know that someone has visited the site using Tor; however, no details identifying the user would be given to the site. Tor uses over 6,000 different nodes around the world in the network, making it nearly difficult to isolate a user’s location. But new opponents attacking Tor are coming up, endangering anonymity.

According to a new research from American and Israeli academics, hackers take control of both the entry and exit relays, which have the capacity to deanonymize Tor users within minutes using “timing attacks” to change the situation.

When 58 percent of Tor circuits access popular websites, they become susceptible to network-level attackers, such as Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) or the NSA. Researchers found that 85.7 percent of all Tor circuits from the country to be vulnerable, where Chinese users are the most susceptible of all to these kinds of attacks.

Though Tor is created to give complete anonymity to its users, the NSA’s position means they have the capacity to view and measure both traffic accessing the Tor network and the traffic that exits. When both the traffics can be viewed by an intelligence agency, easy statistics help an independent system at their control correspond the data up in a timing attack and find unexpectedly the identity of the sender.

Tor developers have been aware of this kind of threat for over a decade and have been since then trying hard for the spy agencies to eavesdrop.

To handle the danger and prevent these identity revealing attacks that can break Tor’s anonymity, American-Israeli researchers built a new Tor client called Astoria.

The researchers say that Astoria can take the number of vulnerable connections on the network from 58 percent to 5.8 percent. The new solution is the first created to completely eliminate the danger of eavesdropping attacks on Tor users, but Astoria uses an algorithm to predict attacks and then securely select relays making the timing attack opportunities less severe for top-tier adversaries.

According to the researchers, Astoria cleverly considers how circuits should be made “when there are no safe possibilities,” how to balance the growing bandwidth load across the Tor network without exposing it to danger and when Astoria is in its most secure configuration how to keep Tor’s performance “reasonable” and relatively quick.