the open web, a hidden service, and so on).Īll of this without even having to break encryption. Using only this metric, the system can determine with 99% accuracy what kind of resource the user is accessing (i.e. MIT researchers used machine learning algorithms to monitor that data and count the packets. When a connection is established over Tor, a lot of data is sent back and forth. Basically, the attacker sets up a computer on the Tor network as an entry node and waits for people to send requests through it. The attack targets the previously mentioned entry nodes, as have several attacks in the past. That’s the only system that knows your real IP address, but the next node in the chain only knows the IP of the entry node, the next only knows the previous node’s address, and so on until you reach the destination.

It all starts at the entry node, sometimes called the guard. offers anonymous access to online resources by passing user requests through multiple layers of encrypted connections.

Nonetheless, researchers at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute have come up with a clever way to track what users on Tor are up to.

Mit tor relays