(When you run the Tor Browser, it starts up the tor daemon.) Your tor daemon (lowercase 'tor' because it's the name of the program) downloads the list of Tor nodes, randomly chooses an entry point (guard) and connects to the guard. The basic way to connect to the Tor network uses a direct connection. This includes how some organizations and nation-states are currently harvesting the list of all known Tor bridges. In this blog entry, I'm going to dive into how bridges are allocated. But that opened the way for direct communications.) (While I had planned out the list of topics in advance, I also had an unexpected reply to a public statement from the Tor Project. (It included brand new ways to detect obfs4 and meek.) These blog posts cover all of the common ways that users connect to the Tor network. In my last blog entries on the 'Tor 0day' theme, I covered different ways to detect direct and indirect (bridge) connections to the Tor network. As noted at Wikipedia (my red emphasis):Ī zero-day (also known as 0-day) vulnerability is a computer-software vulnerability that is unknown to, or unaddressed by, those who should be interested in mitigating the vulnerability (including the vendor of the target software) and is being actively exploited in the wild. Because there are currently no vendor-provided patches or viable workarounds, these are still zero-day exploits. However, there are no official patches, no deployed solutions, nothing currently in beta testing, and no estimated release dates for these critical issues. The Tor developers assured me that they are working on resolutions. I want to emphasize that none of the findings in this blog entry are new to the Tor Project - most have been known for years. This blog entry includes feedback from the Tor Project. They also received the list of specific findings that are covered in this blog entry, before it went public. The Tor developers who respond to media requests never saw the list they have now received my list of topics. Although the Tor Project had received advanced notice of these blog topics (by more than a month), I learned that the list had not been passed down their management chain. I certainly hope that they felt the same. I'm not going to detail the topics discussed, but I will say that it was friendly, informative, and felt productive.

(I told a few to make an appointment I don't do impromptu.) Among other things, I had my first direct chat with a few developers from the Tor Project. I've also had a couple of interview requests. I've have a lot of contacts from companies and people who wanted more information about Tor exploits.

Private tor bridge