[anonymouszx]

> Tor pretends to be secure, but is dark and compromised.

Citation needed. Please stop with the "tor is compromised" meme... and what do you even mean by "dark"? What the hell... Tor is by no means a perfect anonymity solution but it's to my knowledge the best we've got. It's certainly way better than a VPN or no anonymization at all.

More specifically, tor anonymity is limited by the fact that it's low-latency. This is a fundamental limitation of any low-latency transport layer and not the fault of the tor developers or any obscure forces. In particular, if your attacker has control of both your entry point (your tor guard node or your ISP) and your exit point (tor exit node, or the tor hidden service or website you are connecting to) , it becomes possible to de-anonymize your connection (to the specific exit point in question) through traffic analysis. There's just no way around that for a network meant to transport real-time traffic (as opposed to plain data or email for instance). And yes, it stands to reason that various intelligence agencies will have invested in running exit nodes or entry nodes but this is just unavoidable. What you can do counteract this is to run your own nodes or to donate to (presumably) trustworthy node operators.

I think it's also worth noting that although tor can by no means 100% guarantee that you will be free from government surveillance at all times, it does make mass surveillance more difficult and more error-prone, and to me that's the whole point. Furthermore, although government surveillance cannot be thwarted 100%, tor does make corporate surveillance basically impossible (assuming you can avoid browser fingerprinting; this is what the tor browser is for).

All in all, I can't claim tor is perfect (because it can't be!) but the more people use it the better it gets and it's certainly better than anything else, so please stop spreading FUD and encourage people to use it instead.

Also, it's unclear to me how Stealth helps at all with hiding the IP addresses of its participants... It claims to be "private" but the README doesn't say anything about network privacy...

[nullstyle]

Their claims around privacy seem pretty hand-wavy to me; I’d love to be wrong.

As an example, their usage of DNS is simply DNS-over-HTTPS against the big public resolvers in a round-robin fashion: https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth/blob/X0/stealth/s...

The code doesn’t strike me as concerning itself with protecting privacy so much as changing who will get to log your traffic. Interesting effort though; I’ll hope for more details from them in the future!

[cookiengineer]

How would you implement it then?

Note that the DNS queries are only done when 1) there's no host in the local cache and 2) no trusted peer has resolved it either.

I mean, DNS is how the internet works. Can't do much about it except caching and delegation to avoid traceable specificity.

Pretty much anything else isn't much more secure. Note also that DNS will respect the TOR proxy settings, like everything else regarding networking.

[nullstyle]

“How would you implement it then?”

Chill, bro. I said “seems hand-wavy” and “I’d love to be wrong”. I was hedging my bets and clearly indicating this was a surface-level read. I shouldn’t have to have a better alternative on deck to point out something in the codebase that didn’t seem to be privacy-friendly. No offense was meant.

Since you asked how I would do things: I would have had a clear and detailed security-specific document or section of the readme to detail in what ways it is peer-to-peer and in what ways it is private. I would have probably gestured towards the threat model I used when designing the protocols, but —- let’s be honest —- I’d probably be too lazy to document it adequately. As far as I can tell, there’s one paragraph in its developer guide on security and two paragraphs on peer-to-peer communication and I wasn’t able to get a good read on its concrete design or characteristics.

> Note that the DNS queries are only done when 1) there's no host in the local cache and 2) no trusted peer has resolved it either.

This wasn’t clear to me from my first spelunk through the readme or the docs. Are you affiliated with the project? Is there a good security overview of the project you know of?

> I mean, DNS is how the internet works. Can't do much about it except caching and delegation to avoid traceable specificity.

What I meant to say is, I was not so sure that the google public dns could be considered private. But nevermind on that, I can’t confirm their logging policies. I’m probably just paranoid about how easy google seems to build a profile on me. So yeah, as mentioned, just my initial read.

[cookiengineer]

Hey, my comment wasn't meant in a defending manner...I'm just curious whether I maybe missed a new approach to gathering DNS data :)

I've seen some new protocols that try to build a trustless blockchain inspired system, but they aren't really there yet and sometimes still have recursion problems.

When I was visiting a friend in France I first realized how much is censored there by ISPs and cloudflare/google and others, so that's why I decided it might be a good approach to have a ronin here.

I totally agree that threat model isn't documented. Currently the peer to peer stuff is mostly manual, as there's no way to discover peers (yet). So you would have to add other local machines yourself in the browser settings.

Security wise there's currently a lot of things that are changing, such as the upcoming DNS tunnel protocol that can use dedicated other peers that are connected to the clearnet already by encapsulating e.g. https inside dns via fake TXT queries etc.

> public dns could be considered private

Totally agree here, I tried to find as many DoT and DoH dns servers as possible, and the list was actually longer before.

In 2019 a lot of dns providers went either broke or went commercial (like nextdns which now requires a unique id per user, which defeats the purpose of it completely)... But maybe someone knows a good DoH/DoT directory that's better than the curl wiki on github?

[nullstyle]

Thanks for following up with added info! I’ll look forward to seeing the project progress; It’s an area I’m super interested in. As far as naming systems better at privacy than DNS, I’m not aware of any serious options. Personally, I’m working on implementing something that hopes to improve the verifiability of naming resolutions, but thats a long ways off: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-watson-dinrg-delmap-02