Piercing network anonymity in real time

[Ivan Krstic]

leichter_jerrold at emc.com wrote:
>       The Locate appliance sits passively on the network and
>       analyzes packets in real time to garner ID info from sources
>       like Active Directory, IM and e-mail traffic, then associates
>       this data with network information.

This is really nothing new -- I've been seeing systems like these,
though home brewed, in use for years. The availability of good tools as
a foundation (things like Snort, the layer7 iptables patch, and so on)
makes building decent layer 8 inference not far from trivial. Calling
this "piercing network anonymity in real time" is highly misleading; in
reality, it's more like "making it bloody obvious that there's no such
thing as network anonymity".

The best one can hope for today is a bit of anonymous browsing and IM
with Tor, and that only insofar as you can trust a system whose single
point of failure -- the directory service -- was, at least until
recently, Roger's personal machine sitting in an MIT dorm room.

-- 
Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D

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