Talk:Onion routing/Archive 1

Archive 1

Vandal attack

Anybody know why this page has been getting a DDOS vandal attack? —Ben Brockert (42) UE News 09:00, May 22, 2005 (UTC)

It's linked from a new Slashdot article. adamsan 09:08, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Ah. Why do they always use the same image? I thought the slashdotters were usually pro-wikipedia. Anyway, I've sent abuse messages to eleven places so far, I'll be happy if one of these dorks gets booted off their provider for this. Really, it's a pity, the article could have used some constructive editing. —Ben Brockert (42) UE News 10:12, May 22, 2005 (UTC)

See also: Anonymous P2P link used twice // page locked

TOC

When this page gets unlocked perhaps someone can add __NOTOC__ as the Table of Contents looks a bit silly given the pages layout. Dalf | Talk 21:33, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

I did, but then thought better of it and just added normal sections, so that the TOC would look right. —Ben Brockert (42) UE News 22:28, May 22, 2005 (UTC)

Contents

In the intruduction should be added, that Tor (the 2. Generation Onion Router) was initially designed and developed as part of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's Onion Routing program with support from ONR and DARPA. Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.72.9.86 (talk) 09:17, 18 June 2005 (UTC)

That's a bit misleading; Onion Routing began as an NRL project funded by ONR, and later by DARPA. Much of the Tor (2nd generation) work was contracted by NRL to Moria Research Labs (all of this in covered on the original Onion Routing website). But you're right: there is no mention of NRL in the article, yet they were the ones who created this. Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.93.54.89 (talk) 01:41, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Garlic routing?

Anyone have some info, or comparison of garlic and onion routing? Would such comparison be an appropriate extension of this article? - Aryah (talk) 14:22, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Capitals

It seems unusual for both Onion Routing and Onion Router to be capitalized. Most of the former I found on Google were capitalized, but it appears that common use of the latter is moving away from capitalization. If popular use continues in that direction, at some point the article may need to be moved to Onion routing and the article changed accordingly. —Ben Brockert (42) UE News 22:28, May 22, 2005 (UTC)

Well according to Wikipedia article naming policy the article should be named "Onion routing" with a small r. And even THE onion router (Tor) writes it as "onion routing" and not "Onion Routing" on its official main page. So it seemed to be a clear case, I moved it. I'll wait some day to edit the text in the article accordingly and fix the remaining double redirects, just in case you all go angry about the move... --David Göthberg 17:16, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Dates, please!

It would be great to have some date information as to when each of these events occured. When was Onion Routing started at OAS? The bottom section says that TOR was introduced at the 13th Usenix Security Symposium: what year was that? Tzf 22:00, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

hop-by-hop

Why does hop-by-hop link here? Where is discussion of this term? I was looking for something associated with IPv6's "jumbo payload" option (apparently called hop-by-hop for some unknown reason. Fresheneesz 08:25, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

JAP

Someone should add JAP, the java anonymous proxy, to the software list- http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html Family Guy Guy 08:01, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

JAP is a cascade-mix, not a circuit-based Onion Routing protocol, and would be inappropriate in an Onion Routing article. Try putting it in mix network after that article has been expanded. NoDepositNoReturn (talk) 03:47, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Separate article for mix-nets

Mix-nets (aka Chaum mixes) are technically similar, but algorithmically quite different both in makeup and in security properties compared to onion routing. I assume the redirect is due to lack of content on the mix-net entry; I would suggest that an article for mix-nets be created, or at the very least, section about the differences between onions and mixes be added to this article and the article renamed "mix-nets", as mix-nets are the more general primitive, while onion-routing refers to a specific protocol. NoDepositNoReturn (talk) 03:45, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind, I see the problem: there exists an article Mix_networks but the Mix_net redirect was pointing here, not there. Fixed. NoDepositNoReturn (talk) 03:52, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Parfait Routing

Why not call it Parfait Routing? Parfaits have layers and everyone loves parfaits! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.249.87.190 (talk) 07:58, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

More detailed information available

I have a page on my website that contains (in my not-so-humble opinion) a lot of good information and illustrations on onion-routing, but I know better than to add a link myself. If somebody would like to read my page, and then consider linking to it from an "External links" section, I think the Wikipedia article would benefit from it. But I'll let someone else decide whether it's a worthy link or not. Also, you can feel free to incorporate information and images from my page into the Wikipedia article, it's all original content which I'm releasing under GFDL. The page is bmearns.net/wwk/view/Onion_routing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.215.16.130 (talk) 17:41, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Confusing section: Routing onions

It is unclear in which cases symmetric and asymmetric encryption is used. And how symmetric keys are transferred is a complete mystery. — Vano 19:54, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Hi there, fixed this up with what I hope is a better explanation. Please alter it to be more accurate, I hope I've done a reasonable job - it's very difficult to find the particulars on how onion routing actually *works*, which is why I found this explanation hard to understand and though it needed improving. - 2011-2-26

"Decoy Ciphers" Section

The Decoy Ciphers section appears to have been copy pasted directly from Null cipher, and makes absolutely no sense in this context. --DBN (talk) 05:15, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Rewrite

Just finished a pretty substantial overhaul of the article. Edit summaries along the way mark some thoughts/questions. Feedback/improvements invited.

The biggest thing I feel like I left hanging is what to do about the material over at the Tor article that applies here (and would probably make more sense in this article if the sources weren't all about that specific implementation of onion routing and if that article weren't exponentially more prominent/important than this one). Specifically I'm looking at the Weaknesses section. I didn't expand the current section too far beyond what existed previously (condensed those into two, reworded, and elaborated), but there are many more at the Tor article... --— Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 05:35, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

Excellent rewrite! Thank you.—Finell 04:49, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Why exclude Cyberbot II?

Why does this article forbid edits by Cyberbot II? That is the effect of the following template at the top of the article: {{bots|deny=Cyberbot II}}.—Finell 04:05, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@Finell: The article cites onion-router.net, which was blacklisted as containing the string ".onion" (.onion sites are blacklisted by default, but this was not a .onion site -- a similar issue had happened with www.onion.com). Anyway, it looks like it was added here in response to Cyberbot repeatedly re-adding the blacklist tags. That was in October 2013. In November 2013 there was this thread at the blacklist talk page which looks to have resulted in it being added to MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist. I removed the tag. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:47, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

@Rhododendrites: Thank you for the explanation and for removing the tag.—Finell 19:30, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

Why doesn't know the entry node who is the originator?

In the article it is stated "To preserve the anonymity of the sender, no node in the circuit is able to tell whether the node before it is the originator or another intermediary like itself." then later it is said "the originator obtains a public key from the directory node to send an encrypted message to the first ("entry") node, establishing a connection and a shared secret ("session key"). Using the established encrypted link to the entry node, the originator can then relay a message through the first node to a second node in the chain using encryption that only the second node, and not the first, can decrypt. ". Shouldn't the entry node be able to know the originator because of the payload size of the first approach to establish a connection? If the client establishes a secure connection to the first onion router in the chain, the onion router which is the entry node here, decrypts the message and sees that there is nothing left than a instruction to create a shared secret. --37.209.88.14 (talk) 23:43, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

The key here is that it is trivially easy for the originator to also be the entry node. Just install the Tor browser and start surfing the web. It doesn't matter if the entry node figures out who I am if I am the entry node. And the exit node only exists when the final destination is on the open Internet. if it is a .onion node then the exit node is the destination and thus it is encrypted and onion routed end-to-end. Also, regarding size, the entire system pads small messages, spits up big messages, and sends dummy messages so that it is really hard to figure things out from the size and frequency of the messages going through an intermediate node. --Guy Macon (talk) 05:39, 22 February 2019 (UTC)