Hello, welcome to the Friday, May 27th, 2016 edition of the Sansonet Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Orich, and today I'm recording from Seattle, Washington.

Xavier published today a diary about how to identify connections coming from tour exit notes. This has been a problem for some sites that experienced a lot of attacks emerging from the Tor network.

Of course there are other VPNs out there that have similar effects, but one of the advantages of Tor is that there are published lists of exit notes, so it's

relatively easy to identify them, while some of the other VPN solutions to sort of go out

of their way to make it difficult to identify their exit points.

Another problem with Torr can also be that users in your network are using it in order to evade

egress policies.

Identifying outbound Tor connections can not be done via the exit nodes.

However, usually you can identify them by looking for a zel

connections with specific certificates used by Torr and speaking about Torr the

next version of Tor also known as Proposal 224 has been successfully

tested for the first time in this particular

test multiple servers were stood up with the new software running and then they

actually intentionally took down some of these servers during critical phases

off the protocol and the network as as they say, behaved as expected.

Now, one interesting feature that this new version of Tor Includes is a distributed random number generator.

Generating good random numbers is always a big challenge, and in this case, one way this challenge is addressed by

actually having multiple systems cooperate to come up with a good random

numbers so the idea here is that whatever bias a particular system has in

generating random numbers the other systems will make up for it.

We'll have to see how this will work out in real-life network and whether or not this

distributed random number system can be used somehow against Tor.

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