[belorn]

For users wanting to prevent their ISP from sniffing around then tor works as intended. Against advertisers it also work decently as a self cleaning browsers that constantly change its IP address.

For developers and sysadmins that want to get an outside look at their own services or investigate third party websites (like fraudulent lookalike) it work pretty effective with some caveats.

It also works mostly fine against national and ISP firewalls that is intended to censor citizens and lead people away from places which the state has declared unsuited for its population.

Against police force it seem to mostly work as a free tool that get used by criminals as something better than nothing, but with some larger caveats and the police have cases from time to time where they have identified criminals (from either good investigations or parallel constructions depending on who you ask). The tor browsers has also not been immune to malware.

Against national-level intelligence agency, "citizen scores", and whistleblowers employed within such agencies, the protection granted by tor may be very far from 100%. It is not recommended by anyone to depend on tor against that threat model.

[sandworm101]

>> It is not recommended by anyone to depend on tor against that threat model.

That depends as much on the use case as the threat. Traffic analysis attacks require traffic. Short burst communication via tor (chat/email/bot control commands etc) are not traced as easily as large file downloads or random web browsing. Attacks on the client (malware) are also very hardware dependant. A target using the same Tor client on the same hardware regularly is a softer target than someone connecting randomly via a variety of devices.

The NSA (Or FSB/FBI/CIA et al) are not SHIELD. They operate in the realworld with realworld physics/math. If they did have reliable and simple backdoors into Tor we would have heard about them by now.

[kart23]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullrun_(decryption_program)

I think you may be underestimating them here, I don't doubt their ability to keep their capabilities secret.

[hpoe]

How you figure we would heard about it? I mean the only reason we know they can break RSA 50% of the time was because of Snownden and that was like 10 years ago or so.

I mean these people are really good at keeping things secret, I remember reading books written in the late 80's that still said the first use of computers was calculating artillery tables, not codebreaking.

[tialaramex]

> I mean the only reason we know they can break RSA 50% of the time was because of Snownden and that was like 10 years ago or so.

Edward Snowden's revelations were about seven years ago, and did not include anything about the NSA breaking RSA encryption or signatures 50% of the time or any other amount. Who knows where you got that from, but not Edward Snowden.

> I remember reading books written in the late 80's that still said the first use of computers was calculating artillery tables, not codebreaking.

That would be because it was true. The purpose of the Difference Engine and of early mechanical calculating machines that were actually built at the time was construction of tables.

Colossus (which was used for breaking Lorenz) is an early electronic computer, but certainly not the first such computer and it isn't a stored program computer (to change what Colossus does it's necessary to physically disassemble it) so it's not actually part of the lineage of stored program computers we use today.

The Ultra Secret was published in 1974 - after that point the fact that Colossus existed and everything else about war work at Bletchley was not a secret. So Ultra was kept secret for just over thirty years.

[remexre]

I thought that was, they can/could break HTTPS half the time, and that was the Logjam attack.

[ColanR]

> Against national-level intelligence agency, "citizen scores", and whistleblowers employed within such agencies, the protection granted by tor may be very far from 100%. It is not recommended by anyone to depend on tor against that threat model.

Are there any alternatives then, that do work against this threat model? It seems like a lot of the real need for such a tool is for journalists and activists who do need protection against national-level threat actors.

[teddyh]

I think you misunderstand. For such adversaries, Tor is good enough for what it does, but not sufficient. You probably want something like TAILS as part of a whole package of serious real-world OpSec.

[ezluckyfree]

>It also works mostly fine against national and ISP firewalls that is intended to censor citizens and lead people away from places which the state has declared unsuited for its population.

Can't most countries just block all Tor traffic? Russia does this as far as I know. If you're the kind of state that would have a national firewall, why would you let your citizens use Tor at all?

[tgragnato]

https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#aggregate/as/flag:sta...

[ixfo]

Sort of. There are transports that make Tor traffic look identical to generic HTTPS traffic etc. So you can filter based on endpoints, but that's hard to do for unlisted bridges and the like. In terms of exits, most countries prefer not to block them.

[belorn]

It seems that a lot of such blocking are done with a lower kind of effort by those who are tasked to implement it. An example is the UK porn and piracy filters,but also a bunch of east state countries with the "whoops, you entered a bad place" firewalls.

I would speculate that the purpose of those are not to be a perfect blocks but rather a methods to mold and redirect citizens towards what the state want.

[hechang1997]

Not in China. Please use a forward proxy if you were to use Tor in China.