More applications using the network means more cover traffic as well.
Agree. The biggest barrier for me using Tor is the perception held by many IT admins is that Tor is synonymous with nefarious. It makes using it inconvenient or impossible in many highly controlled network environments such as enterprise, public access wifi, etc.
Why!? That sounds like approximately 20 too many.
I wish AES-GCM was available...but openssl can't do it on its own without further dependencies to parse the authentication correctly.
Really this whole layer is complelty redundant actually. It's already E2EE without openssl via Tor. I like that it's encrypted before I hit the network pipe though.
great attitude for approximately everything except, perhaps, cryptography.
especially since the initial encryption is mostly redundant, i would encourage that you, at some point, consider reducing the number of ciphers.
Then maybe your scientists should spend some time to stop and consider whether they should ;)
But seriously, I'd just limit this to one option on the selection side, even if you continue supporting more than that at the protocol level for cryptographic agility.
Within the last 12 months, I had to write a script for a buddy at work that turned off availability of freaking freaking 56 bit DES in OpenSSH, which was available because was provided by openssl. I'm certain it was still there to provide compatibility for something(s) critical out there that depends on it, and while I can't imagine why anybody would choose to use it, it's there and it's awful.
It still supports a bunch of outdated crap including (on my system) RC4, RC2(!) and DES (yes, the 56 bit key one, not just 3DES).
So in addition to a sensible default I guess it would also be a good idea to tag choices that you believe to be outdated with a large warning. That way you haven't rolled your own crypto, you haven't forced your views on others, but you have done your best to enable end users to operate your tool in a sensible manner.
Rather than what is accepted as the strongest ciphers I prefer ciphers not optimized by CPU's and GPU's. Spooks will have to cycle through every combination of protocol + cipher + mac + mode + passphrase + whatever other obfuscation I shim inside that tunnel. Keep 'em on their toes. Even better I will also cycle through these encoding methods [1] if I am in a good mood otherwise I will rot13 their ass and then force them to use a Drogan’s Decoder Wheel.
I think it's a pretty light background process.
This way you could establish communication with an unknown future party, totally offline.
[1] https://0x.co
If you're printing something why not go with a QR code?
However, if you're walking down the street and need to quickly generate and apply a message, how will you pass along a QR code to an unknown future viewer ?
Can you draw a QR code with chalk or freehand with a pen, etc. ?
I will admit that the use-cases for "oh by codes" are weird and infrequent but I am convinced they will emerge ...
Interesting that people do this, I wonder how much it improves security? Afterall, any serious surveillance would involve running relays and exits in foreign lands.
Let's say we have 10 people in a call, 5 share a key and the other 5 share a different key. Without the shared key audio simply will not decrypt. You could have two private channels with one host.
Curious what codec you're using for the audio compression. Opus would be the obvious choice for speech but the tradeoffs change a bit when you're not doing real-time streaming.
I was really surprised at the intelligability even at 6kbs.
The caviot is if your on termux we have to use the seperate termux API application to pipe audio to termux, and ffmpeg to convert MP4 to opus. Unfortunately termux cannot activate the mic on its own.
Very interesting project, by the way.
On termux 'termux-microphone-record' is a wrapper around androids 'mediarecorder'. It doesn't support raw pcm output. It records AAC in m4a wrapper and then the extra ffmpeg package converts this to rawpcm so it can follow the same pipeline.
'|| true' 76 matches 'echo ""' 50 matches ' [ ' 261 matches '=$(' 90 matches
Basically IRC, but for Tor.
Still: Using a line based protocol and base64 encoding the audio data? Not my first choice.
The README doesn't mention it, but I assume both parties have to be online at the same time?
Regarding encryption - what's the point? When communicating with a tor hidden service, the data is already encrypted.
Only starting the sending audio data after the speaker has stopped talking means much longer delays than necessary. Imagine someone talking for a minute.
To receive a call, you either need to be online and actively listening for calls, or optionally, you can enable auto listening. When another user calls you it will automatically put you in the call. On end call you will be put back in listening mode. I'm not really sure a great way to get around this without overly complicating it.
I believe because of the small overhead that's added there is just no reason not to layer encryption. At the end of the day I just wanted to see the bits I'm sending over the wire with my own eyes for assurance it's protected regardless of the fact that tor is protecting the data.
The streaming would be a nice improvement for latency. I would have to look into how this would work for the optional audio processing. Having one set file for transport also simplifys the some of the flow with encryption like salting and optional hmac authentication as these are derived from the sum of the entire file, not a portion of it.
Do you mean IVs? Can't you (for most algorithms) just use a monotonic counter when streaming blocks?
> optional hmac authentication
Wouldn't that just be done per-chunk instead of per-file?
by the spooks that wrote it. no harm in having another turtle in the stack.
send.vis.ee along with ffsend[0] maybe?
0: https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend
I love and use ffsend every day.
Thanks for contributing!
It ended up being awful. A standard real time call your able to interject and talk over someone and this works because of the low latency. The other person can stop talking and the conversation still flows.
The latency from Tor just makes it awkward to the point that you have to almost relearn how to have a conversation since by the time your interjecting and they hear the interjection, a whole 6 seconds may have passed and they may already be on a whole other train of thought. Walkie talkie architecture just forces you to listen and digest the message, think, respond.
There are two layers of encryption here. Tor, which already is encrypting the data, and locally via openssl before transmit.
I have 21 ciphers programed in from the openSSL library. There's a lot more available in the library but these are supposedly the strongest. The cipher used is not secret so while in the call you can see your cipher, and the remote cipher real time.
The authentication is resting entirely in the users lap. It's up to them how to come up with key exchange.
For me, I would be comfortable enough knowing the other side is who I think it is by the simple fact that audio is passing through. Establishing a connection once in person is most ideal.
Because the .onion is derived on device, an attacker can't just forge that. You need also need the private key for a connection to be established.
Let's say an attacker copies the directory from one of the endpoints and has the private key now and can launch tor under your static address. Well, because the additional shared secret is encrypted with another password known only to the user it's useless. The other side will not be receiving forged audio because of this barrier. They may get as far as being in a call, but no audio is going to be played back because the shared secret was successful protected. Even if you pass your message to the attacker, decryption will fail and nothing will pass.
Directly after sending, we run rm -f on $raw_file, $opus_file, $enc_file.
Audio is recived to /audio folder. After audio is decrypted and played we run rm -f $enc_file, $dec_file. There is only a split second that it lives on disk until it's gone.
For those who use Tor regularly for things other than web browsing: how bad is the real-world latency for pushing a ~20KB Opus audio chunk over Tor these days? Are we talking a 2-3 second delay, or is it much worse?
Also, once it's decrypted and played back, the message gets destroyed.
edit: https://veilid.com/
Added link for clarity. Seems like you could get more or less realtime, udp streaming, full duplex communication . Once you have the first part of that built, then adding things like voip or video calls or what have you becomes a lot easier.
I know you can set up mumble over Tor but it's going to have the same latency drawbacks.
Another commenter noted the ability to configure only 1 hop instead of the standard 3. I wonder how much latency would be gained back. I want to play around with this.
You could use tor to anchor a common relay, then do key and route exchange to establish veilid, then the realtime app uses that for a very secure private route unique to the two endpoints.
From what I can tell, because of the design, veilid would be excellent, comparable to many commercial voip offerings, with 150-500ms latency . More nodes and users would quickly ramp that up. There are a ton of downstream benefits of something like this; faster file exchange for ipfs, bittorent, etc, that doesn't gum up the tor layer, a kind of implicit defense in depth, but also low latency, efficient peer to peer routing.
It'd almost be zero knowledge by construction; you could build a multi-hop escrow style key exchange.
If Musk integrated tor relays and veilid peers throughout Starlink, you could get near-native latency for wherever you connect in the world, more than enough to add timing attack noise and layer in other security features.
Modulo cool project love show HN etc.