With 2.5 million daily users, the Tor network is the world\u2019s most popular system for protecting Internet users\u2019 anonymity. For more than a decade, people living under repressive regimes have used Tor to conceal their Web-browsing habits from electronic surveillance, and websites hosting content that\u2019s been deemed subversive have used it to hide the locations of their servers.<\/p>\n
Researchers at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have now demonstrated a vulnerability in Tor\u2019s design. At the Usenix Security Symposium this summer, they will show that an adversary could infer a hidden server\u2019s location, or the source of the information reaching a given Tor user, by analyzing the traffic patterns of encrypted data passing through a single computer in the all-volunteer Tor network.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, the same paper also proposes defenses, which representatives of the Tor project say they are evaluating for possible inclusion in future versions of the Tor software.<\/p>\n