Page 60 - Cyber Warnings August 2017

Tor’s challenges: anonymity, privacy and security

By Milica D. Djekic

The Onion Router or simply Tor is a project that has appeared in 1977 being supported by the
US Department of Defense. Since then it has passed a long way through until these days. The
Tor’s system is a real combination of anonymity, privacy and security that is available to many
social factors including the Law Enforcement agencies, Military Forces, intelligence community,
common people, journalist, activists as well as some security threats such as terrorist and
organized crime groups. According to some sources – Tor is capable to offer anonymity and
privacy at the same glance. On the other hand, it’s a project getting capacity to deal with the
certain level of security. The first thing anyone would notice with this system is its three levels of
encryption. Basically, Tor’s solution would cope with its nodes or relays that are computers
being the parts of Tor’s network that are set up to do some cryptography for such a system. The
role of an entry node is to take the traffic from the user and protect its data using three levels of
encryption. Further, the middle node would deal with two layers of cryptography, while the
communication between destinating client and exit node would get no encryption at all. The
purpose of this article is to try to provide a good insight into all the challenges of this concept as
well as deal with some real case examples.

Anonymity, privacy and security

We would mention before all three concepts
being anonymity, privacy and security and
now it’s our turn to try to explain how they
work in a practice. First, let’s start with the
anonymity. The anonymity is a condition
which would offer you to know what someone
does, but not who that person is. As
illustration on our left would suggest – it’s
more like dealing with someone without the
face. Indeed, Tor’s system would offer that
opportunity based on that anyone could
create an account with the Tor and those
folks would usually apply fake names or even
steal someone’s identity. Practically, that’s
how we can consider this system as being
anonymous. Also, we would want to mention that Tor’s network is role-based which means that
the user with the highest permissions could see other people’s accounts. For instance, it’s quite
suitable to the investigations because the investigative officer would get a chance to access
many accounts and read their communication, but he will still struggle with the identity of those
communicators.

On the other hand, privacy is a concept where you know who someone is, but you are not
confident about his activities. In some cases, Tor can offer you these opportunities for a reason
that only defense professionals would get an opportunity to see your secret communication,
while the rest of the users would not deal with such a privilege – so, to them your talk would stay
private. The modern people would greatly care about their privacy, so it’s quite recommendable

60 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – August 2017 Edition
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