Is Tor safe to use?

Question

I know the deep/dark web is very dangerous and everyone should be wary but I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about visiting some ordinary website like you would on chrome/mozilla like pinterest or tumblr.
Could someone from the deep web someone still access your information?
Is it still dangerous?

Answer 1

TOR is safe to use.



TOR does 2 things:

1. Anonymizes you by encrypting your traffic through it's network and bounces your traffic through 3 of it's Nodes before it emerges onto the normal internet.



2. Does that plus allows you to access .onion sites normally not available on the regular internet. It's generally safe to look around these sites. Just don't go trying to do something illegal there.



Is TOR 100% perfect at keeping you anonymous? No. But it's an important tool that helps.



TOR also has a real risk that if a hacker or government agency sets up their own Node as the first or last Node in the chain, they could theoretically see what you are doing. For this reason, if you really need to keep this private from authorities in your country, tell TOR to keep resetting the Nodes until the ones in your country (or their allies) aren't in the list of Nodes, or at least not the first and last Nodes in the list.

Answer 2

The major issue with Tor browser is that it uses nodes. If you access your email account using Tor then it just makes you identify yourself clearly with it.

If you let the traffic pass through you, you will only make it more difficult to identify who is using Tor. Honestly, this is one of the many reasons why if you use Tor you NEED to run a VPN with it. Preferably one with little or no logs that can't be used to trace you. I think everything has some good and bad coming along with it and if you want to protect yourself from tracking then you need to install a firewall software so that it hides your IP address and keeps your computer safe. Have the basic security software that can protect you from all the online threats that exists in the market.

Answer 3

Tor is quite safe to use.



Seeing as Tor anonymizes your data, there's really no way anything or anyone could track you in the Deep Web. Just be careful about what you do there. Treat the Deep Web like a really, really old spooky mansion. You can cruise through and observe it, but if you don't touch anything, it won't touch you. Simple as that. Oh, and make sure you have a beefy anti-virus before you download anything from the Deep Web.

Answer 4

No, no-one "from the deep web" can access your information. From that point of view, it's safer than regular internet if you don't trust your ISP (or the hotel network, or the neighbour whose wifi you've been stealing).

Your information is at risk when you get confused by Facebook privacy settings, or enter a lot of correct personal details into some not-very-well-protected site just because they ask for it, like using your work phone number and real name at Ashley Madison.

Answer 5

Tor has called for calm after new academic research into traffic analysis showed that it was possible to identity 81 per cent of users on the anonymity network. The technique, which tracks patterns in Tor connections as they pass around the web, could allow nation states to unmask Tor users with a false-positive rate of just over six percent.



The results appear alarming but security experts said the revelations were nothing new. While it is theoretically possible to track Tor users by linking up their entry and exit points on the anonymity network, doing so has proven difficult.



Research led by professor Sambuddah Chakravarty from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in Delhi showed that in laboratory tests it was possible to spot and follow Tor traffic. The experiment uses readily available traffic monitoring technology, in this case Cisco's NetFlow, to analyse Tor traffic on a massive scale.



As Tor traffic behaves very differently to ordinary web traffic it is possible to spot its patterns, Chakravarty argued:



"A powerful adversary can mount traffic analysis attacks by observing similar traffic patterns at various points of the network, linking together otherwise unrelated network connections."



In laboratory tests the experiment was 100 percent accurate, falling to 81.4 percent in real-world experiments. Tor project leader Roger Dingledine said the six percent false positive rate made the attack "effectively useless", adding that academic research into traffic analysis on the network was still hugely important.



"Traffic confirmation attacks are not a new area so don't freak out without actually reading the papers," he concluded. The false positive rate is the experiments main problem. Conducting traffic analysis on the millions of active Tor connections would create tens of thousands of false positives, making it almost impossible to be sure you had tracked anyone successfully.



While it is easy to spot and follow traffic flows on small networks, doing so when there are millions of traffic flows becomes near impossible. False-positives, when an algorithm incorrectly thinks it has found a match, become more commonplace on larger networks.



Responding to questions on the Tor blog Chakravarty said that sensationalist media reports had got the facts wrong:



"Firstly, they [the media] have blow it a bit out of proportion by saying that '81 percent of Tor traffic', which is not true. It was only 81.4 percent of our experiments, and we have spoken about this upfront in our paper," he explained.



If governments found a way to unmask Tor users en masse it could have catastrophic consequences for free speech and privacy online. Both GCHQ and the NSA are known to target Tor users, but thus far the anonymity network has been a tough nut to crack.



http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-11/20/tor-still-secure