New Release: Tor Browser 9.5a5

The following comment is relevant to

https://blog.torproject.org/tor-village-iff-2020-call-proposals

[Moderator: that thread is closed to comments--- why?]

> Here are several ideas we're interested for you to explore, but do not feel limited to these

I request that Tor Project encourage participants to engage in a wide-ranging, honest, and thorough discussion of two vexing problems which so far TP has tended to ignore--- which could have tragic consequences for Tor users all over the world. To wit:

1. What are the most likely USG backdoors in the Tor network and how can TP keep them out? Any discussion cannot be limited to source code published by TP itself, because history and common sense (technically speaking) both strongly suggest that NSA is much more likely to mess with "upstream" code and with critical infrastructure such as pseudorandom number generators and the Directory Authorities than to try to plant obvious backdoors in published Tor source code.

2. What can TP do to make it hard for intelligence agencies (particularly NSA but not limited to NSA) to exploit the volunteer network of Tor nodes by fielding large possibly undeclared families of high bandwidth entry and exit nodes which covertly share datastreams? One tiny, easy, and inexpensive step TP would take would be to restart the invaluable service formerly provided by torstatus.blutmagie.de, and to provide more "official" data to nusenu.

Concerning the suggestion that the Tor community can and must learn from the history of USG cryptographic backdoors, a notable story recently published by the Washington Post is based upon Greg Miller's access to a top secret CIA history of the longest running well known backdoor scheme in NSA history, the crippling of commercial cipher machines sold by CryptoAG and its successor companies:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-security/ci…
‘The intelligence coup of the century’
For decades, the CIA read the encrypted communications of allies and adversaries.
Greg Miller
11 Feb 2020

Most privacy advocates will recall how the publication of the landmark history of cryptography by David Kahn, The Codebreakers, MacMillan, 1967, was almost stopped by NSA; fortunately, Kahn's publisher courageously fought back against DOJ threats and the book was published. The book later became a major inspiration for Whitfield Diffie during the long search for what became the first openly published and workable public/private keypair exchange scheme. On p. 432 of the first edition, Kahn, who interviewed Boris Hagelin for his book, provided a strong hint that he knew something was up with CryptoAG: "Hagelin does not attempt to cryptanalyze his own machine ciphers, however, probably because he fully understands the principles of solution and realizes that the [commercial] success of his machines depends upon proper usage". Because the overall lesson of Kahn's history is to trust nothing and check everything, continuously, this statement whatever makes no sense in the context of the rest of the book, unless one interprets it as a cryptic hint that CryptoAG machines were not secure. The apparent hint was immediately noticed by alert privacy advocates, but was strangely overlooked by several dozen governments which should have known better.

Lincoln once remarked that a government cannot fool all of the people all of the time, but perhaps we should not be surprised by evidence that USG found it easy to fool virtually all of the governments (of other nations) for so many decades, because we have so much evidence supporting the view that governments are invariably not only far more evil but also far more foolish than The People they rule.

It is notable that as a teenager, Kahn was a neighbor of William and Elizebeth Friedman, who encouraged his interest in cryptology. After WWII, the relationship between the Friedmans and NSA quickly soured, precisely over the issue of NSA continuing to spy on allies and on US citizens during peacetime, and NSA came to regard the USG's most accomplished former cryptanalyst with deep suspicion. When NSA security agents raided the Friedman's home after NSA absurdly retroactively classified Friedman's landmark Riverbank publications (which has introduced the application of statistics to cryptanalysis), many decades after their pre WWI private publication--- Elizebeth politely served tea to the intruders while William sat in an armchair inscrutably smoking his pipe--- the NSA agents were unaware that WFF had already given his personal copies to his bright teenaged neighbor (David Kahn). WFF was also a personal friend of Boris Hagelin, which played a role in ensuring that CryptoAG continued to sell backdoored machines to targets of the USIC communications intelligence intercept programs (the targets were pretty much everyone but the FVEY members, which is odd because German and Swiss intelligence officials were aware of the scheme; it is notable in light of current events that NATO partners Turkey, Greece and Italy were major NSA targets throughout NSA's existence). Indeed, AFAIK WFF gave Kahn a letter of introduction to Hagelin which resulted in the interview reported in the 1967 book.

As a long-time and loyal Tor user/supporter, I am concerned that TP has for so many years ignored requests to direct some mental energy toward the two problems cited above.

A closely related question: what can TP do to mobilize its US userbase to form a movement of grass-roots opposition to calls from FBI for mandating backdoors in all softwares which use encryption? C.f. FBI's "Going Dark" FUD campaign, which has been furiously promoted by A.G. Barr, Sessions, and Holder--- to mention just the three most recent DOJ officials who have made themselves the avowed enemies of the Tor community.