The whonixTM wiki currently assumes that aside of known network attacks based on TOR and operational security fails of their users that TOR would hold against all kind of attacks except targeted (network) attacks and malicious relays. one thing that is not documented is security of TOR source code and their encryption choices.
in this thread I will discuss in detail a possible TOR backdoor in current TOR agent (and TOR Rust rewrite) that makes all TOR traffic same as unencrypted HTTP traffic.
before I start I recommend you read about ECDSA and it’s proven backdoor
while there are projects like SafeCurves they all focused on implementing simpler and less secure implementation in order to merely hopefully reduce chance of backdoor working, this approach wouldn’t work due fact they still use same bugged algorithm.
For longest time I thought TOR used RSA but as turns out it has been using ECDSA for quite a while now. I tried contacting TOR developers to see why they chose it over RSA but to no avail.
so I consulted wiki and ECDSA apparently has a small improvement of speed when signing but RSA is still faster while encrypting which again most operations in TOR code are encrypting and not signing
And to add more nails to coffin both ECDSA and RSA fail when it comes to quantum computers, however, RSA is proven to be much more secure against traditional computers than ECDSA is.
ECDSA is also a lot more complex algorithm wise which opens up for more backdoors and attacks in implementations aside from the main backdoor
It doesn’t make sense why they would insert a bugged algorithm in a software that is used by a lot of important and vulnerable people
TOR developers are not amateurs they have chosen ECDSA for a reason despite it’s proven backdoor
Someone like NSA who also been proven to spy on cables in sea would be able to capture TOR traffic and decipher them without running a single relay
I am not sure how this flew under the radar. I am not sure what whonixTM could do about this except the very laborious switching to another network. This is merely a discussion and not fear mongering post