Author: Tim Ruffing 2018-09-07 13:00:08
Published on: 2018-09-07T13:00:08+00:00
In a discussion about improving the confidentiality of Tor, Gregory Maxwell suggested that the current implementation provides "no confidentiality at all." He proposed using BIP151 to add some long-term confidentiality hedge. The discussion then turned to the potential adoption of NewHope, with concerns raised over its difficulty to implement. However, people already make claims regarding Bitcoin's post-quantum security and this should not be an argument against improving security. The conversation also touched on the possibility of making the traffic look like any other protocol which uses encryption to avoid censorship, even if traffic analysis still works. Gregory noted that this is more interesting than protecting against potential decryption of P2P connections in a few decades. The topic of re-keying was also discussed, with suggestions made for using a ciphersuite that effectively "rekeyed" every message or creating an adhoc construction. There were also suggestions about adding new message types that could contain messages and pads to obfuscate traffic patterns. Finally, there was discussion around disconnecting from nodes in certain cases, with agreement that it was by far the most natural thing to do but it may be better to make it explicit.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T14:44:52.361777+00:00