To hackers, spies, and cyber criminals today, calling Tor “safe” is a little laughable. There are many exploits and workarounds, together with weaknesses that are inevitable to side-channel attacks performed in the real universe, that in some instances the false awareness of cyber security can wind up making comfortable usage of Tor safe than paranoid usage of the web that is standard. If you are someone looking to purchase some marijuana on the web (or communicate securely with your mistress), Tor is likely all right for you. Tor is looking to alter that.

This is coming especially in the aftermath of recent disclosures of wide ranging susceptibility in the anonymity protocols of Tor. A high profile expose accused researchers at Carnegie Mellon of taking a government bounty (apparently a cool million dollars) to de-anonymize specific Tor users (those expressly mentioned in the expose contain a child porn suspect as well as a Dark Marketplace seller).

At this time, multiple safeguard nodes might be used by a Tor connection and the programmers need to ensure that Tor connections make use of the minimal possible variety of safeguard nodes, and rather only one consequently open itself up to more susceptibility than needed — now.

Another push expects to strengthen the crawlers used by search engines, the wall between shadowy net domain names, and specialized server-finders. Among the strengths of a service that is concealed is the fact that it is concealed — not merely the actual place of the server but the electronic address of the service unless you are particularly given the onion address that is randomly created. Should an attacker find that address, it should be protected by Tor’s anonymity protocols. But attackers can not even attempt to obtain services they’ve no idea exist.