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No Place For Tor In The Secured Workplace
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thomasfischer
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thomasfischer,
 User Rank: Author
3/20/2016 | 6:56:43 AM
Re: Factually inaccurate
Hi Adam thanks for your comment, you are technical correct any encrypted traffic leaving the user's endpoint will keep its encryption at the exit node.  The original sentence (which is now corrected) was always in reference to the TOR layer encryption. At the point of exit the traffic loses its TOR encryption thus if the user is not using any other form of encryption like HTTPS/TLS, it will be vulnerable to attack and snooping. Let's remember too that you don't necessarily control the exit node that your traffic will end up at and most users won't take the time to configure their TOR client to use specific exit nodes.

The traffic at the point of exit is vulnerable and there have been a number of studies on this from people like Dan Egerstad in 2007 and from l'École upérieure d'informatique, électronique, automatique. Which have potentially shown that the traffic is both vulnerable to capture but potentially also to de-anonymization (based on analysing the captured packets).

I think you will agree that users don't necessarily pay attention to whether or not their traffic is running over TLS. As the recent public attacks  (such as heartbleed, freak, poddle, etc) on HTTPS/SSL/TLS have demonstrated, the point of exit still potentially leaves the user's traffic vulnerable to attack. How many laymen users do you know that will recognize if their traffic is being snooped or diverted via a man-in-the-middle attack?
Marilyn Cohodas
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Marilyn Cohodas,
 User Rank: Strategist
3/19/2016 | 9:23:23 AM
Re: Factually inaccurate
Thanks for the fact check, Adam. Article has been corrected, per author authorization. Tom will be responding in comments later! 
adamshostack
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adamshostack,
 User Rank: Apprentice
3/18/2016 | 3:27:17 PM
Factually inaccurate
The closing sentence of this article is factually inaccurate.  "In order to do that, the data sent by the client needs to be unencrypted" is simply untrue.  Tor allows the use of HTTPS over Tor (and even encourages it), and some organizations (Facebook) have set up Tor exit nodes to allow safe access to their systems.

 

In fact, Tor encourages use of HTTPS over Tor to address this exact issue, www.torproject.org (slash) download/download-easy.html.en#warning  Item D.


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