Tor is under threat from Russian censorship and Sybil attacks

[DudleySmith]

Tor is under threat from Russian censorship and Sybil attacks

Tor Project leaders disconnect rogue nodes and call on volunteers to bypass censorship.

arstechnica.com

The Tor anonymity service and anticensorship tool has come under fire from two threats in recent weeks: The Russian government has blocked most Tor nodes in that country, and hundreds of malicious servers have been relaying traffic.


Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media, known as Roskomnadzor, began blocking Tor in the country on Tuesday. The move left Tor users in Russia—said by Tor Project leaders to number about 300,000, or about or 15 percent of Tor users—scrambling to find ways to view sites already blocked and to shield their browsing habits from government investigators.

“Illegal content”​

Tor Project managers on early Tuesday said some ISPs in Russia began blocking Tor nodes on December 1 and that Roskomnadzor had threatened to block the main Tor site. A few hours later, the Russian government body made good on those threats.


“The grounds were the spreading of information on the site ensuring the work of services that provide access to illegal content,” Roskomnadzor told the AFP news service on Wednesday in explaining the decision. “Today, access to the resource has been restricted.” The censorship body has previously blocked access to many VPNs that had operated in the country.


Tor managers have responded by creating a mirror site that is still reachable in Russia. The managers are also calling on volunteers to create Tor bridges, which are private nodes that allow people to circumvent censorship. The bridges use a transport system known as obfs4, which disguises traffic so it doesn’t appear related to Tor. As of last month, there were about 900 such bridges.

Several days old story, but ma y explain glitches in some of your browsing.

 

[MisterBeale]