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VPN only with ID check in UK? (thelemmy.club)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.world
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https://mastodon.online/@mullvadnet/116087059413472819

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[–] 10 points 6 months ago* (2 children)

I2P.

Essentially, what if the entire internet worked kinda like how torrents do, and was also anonymized and E2EE?

Well, it would be pretty slow, but it would also be extremely distributed and difficult to censor/disrupt.

Basically, everyone on I2P is a micro-relay for everyone else.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I2p has some flaws that make it potentially dangerous to use in a country targeting civil liberties.

    Tor is a much better choice since it has better anti censorship and anti detection built in.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    It should be noted that we are past the point of tor being able to provide true anonymity from nation state actors.

    The threat vector for tor was always the exit nodes and now that we have the equipment to monitor it you ought to expect tor can also give you up.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    Source?

    The Tor foundation is constantly working to fight all sorts of attacks. Don't buy into misinformation as there are many organizations who stand to benefit from people not using Tor.

    Even if Tor was vulnerable like you say, I'm not sure what else you would use. Not using Tor is worse than using Tor. It is in the interest of the nation states for you to not use it which is while you see them promoting the idea that Tor is insecure.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    The source is “this is a known weakness of tor and always has been”, there have been a number of white papers and conference talks on this over the years.

    When tor was developed it was known what the weakness was. Mitigation is possible, but you can not certainly say 100% that tor will anonymize you, unfortunately.

    The exit nodes being the weakness in tor has always been known, any actor capable of monitoring and capturing enough traffic on exit nodes can correlate it, at that point you have to track it.

    Tor alone can not protect you, but it is a pretty significant tool. You need defense in depth if you intend to protect your identity.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I think you are overestimating the threat model. Nothing is ever fool proof but Tor does make it extremely difficult to actually identify someone. You are talking about a hypothetical attack vs something that is actually feasible to pull off. Tor is design so that there can be many compromised nodes without to much danger. Tor's popularity as makes it hard to track individuals since there is a lot of traffic.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 child)

    Hard disagree.

    What flaws are you talking about?

    Also, we know that a major problem with TOR is that LE/Intel agencies run their own nodes, and if you bounce through enough of them, or you got through a honeypot exit node, they can deanonymize you, this has happened before, and it probably happens more than is publically known.

    That and if you run a node, and the US government finds out, and they don't like you, they will shut it down, raid you.

    Meanwhile, the multi-stage packet encryption and relay method of I2P makes it much more difficult to decrypt a packet and then also figure out which parts of which packet are going to who.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    You really should consider the fact that there are parties who have a vested interest in making people doubt Tor. Tor is the best option we have by far and is currently far superior than i2p. It is designed to keep anonymity even with compromised nodes. Doing a deanonymizing attack is extremely hard and costly and only has a small chance of actually succeeding and that's before the new crypto algorithm roles out which makes this kind if attack pretty much impossible. Nothing is perfect but Tor does a pretty good job. It also has some of the most robust censorship resistance tools available and works in Russia and Iran. They solved the denial of service issue with a proof of work system a while back so performance wise Tor is now much better.

    Meanwhile I2p still has issues with its design which the developers acknowledge on the website. This isn't meant to be hate against i2p but simply an analysis of the real world facts. I2p shouldn't be used anywhere where anonymity is critical as it is vulnerable to attack due to some outstanding issues with its design. Even outside out deanonymity, i2p still has issues with denial of service attacks and it doesn't have a simple solution for name resolution which is rather dangerous. I like it and concept and run my own node but I wouldn't rely on it for survival. Building a p2p network is really really hard which is why Tor uses a more centralized approach.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    If you want to look more into that, there's a company called Holepunch that's exploring a lot of that technology. But as a heads up they are funded by a crypto company.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago*

    I mean, I2P is a FOSS project, from its inception.

    Frankly, I don't a damn for any tech being developed by a private company of crypto bros, they're all corrupt liars, beyond the possible exception of monero, who seem to actually be competent at security/privacy/anonymity, unlike literally all other crypto.

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