Mike Perry: Securing the tor network

Black Hat Briefings, USA 2007 [Audio] Presentations from the security conference.

Imagine your only connection to the Internet was through a potentially hostile environment such as the Defcon wireless network. Worse, imagine all someone had to do to own you was to inject some html that runs a plugin or some clever javascript to bypass your proxy settings. Unfortunately, this is the risk faced by many users of the Tor anonymity network who use the default configurations of many popular browsers and other network software. Tor is designed to make it difficult even for adversaries that control several points in the network to determine where you're coming from or where you're going, yet these "data anonymity" attacks and attacks to bypass Tor can be performed effectively by a malicious website, or just one guy with a Ruby interpreter! To add insult to injury, software vendors seldom consider such exploits and other privacy leaks as real vulnerabilities.
Fortunately, there are some things that can be done to improve the security of the web browser and Tor users in general. This talk will discuss various approaches to securing the Tor network and Tor usage against a whole gauntlet of attacks, from browser specific, to general intersection risks, to theoretical attacks on routing itself. Methods of protection discussed will include node scanning, transparent Tor gateways, Firefox extensions (including the dark arts of Javascript hooking), and general user education. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses, which will be discussed in detail.