Versatile software engineer with a background in .NET consulting and CMS development. Working on regaining my embedded development skills to get more involved with IoT opportunities.
That was a very well-written article! I loved the way you bounced between theory and practical examples...it kept me engaged and you transitioned between different implementations of the idea of proxying very smoothly.
I think the biggest challenge today we face is "can I trust this proxy server?" If one party manages to gain access to a significant number of Tor exit nodes, then the system breaks down. It's also interesting how people can end up inviting along unwanted attention by analyzing their anonymous actions. I have seen a lot of non-technical folks advise that using Tor + a VPN is the ultimate security hack, when it's non only redundant, but is an unusual enough behavior that would attract some unwanted attention from anyone between a curious network admin and a three letter agency.
As a response, we now have Tor relays, which provide an ingress point for a large number of users. The more users entering a relay, and the more varied their behavior, the harder it is to follow patterns or identify signature activities.
I wonder if we will see more chaos as a way to protect our privacy. If you throw enough random Google searches in for an IP address or fingerprint, you end up with irrelevant data. Fuzzing data not with the intent to break things, but with the intent of preserving some basic notion of privacy or ideal of non-identity.
Networking is such a deep subject and so very overwhelming to get a grasp of, but I think it has become one of my favorite areas to randomly study.
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That was a very well-written article! I loved the way you bounced between theory and practical examples...it kept me engaged and you transitioned between different implementations of the idea of proxying very smoothly.
I think the biggest challenge today we face is "can I trust this proxy server?" If one party manages to gain access to a significant number of Tor exit nodes, then the system breaks down. It's also interesting how people can end up inviting along unwanted attention by analyzing their anonymous actions. I have seen a lot of non-technical folks advise that using Tor + a VPN is the ultimate security hack, when it's non only redundant, but is an unusual enough behavior that would attract some unwanted attention from anyone between a curious network admin and a three letter agency.
As a response, we now have Tor relays, which provide an ingress point for a large number of users. The more users entering a relay, and the more varied their behavior, the harder it is to follow patterns or identify signature activities.
I wonder if we will see more chaos as a way to protect our privacy. If you throw enough random Google searches in for an IP address or fingerprint, you end up with irrelevant data. Fuzzing data not with the intent to break things, but with the intent of preserving some basic notion of privacy or ideal of non-identity.
Networking is such a deep subject and so very overwhelming to get a grasp of, but I think it has become one of my favorite areas to randomly study.