On Mon, Mar 20, 2023 at 03:31:23PM -0600, mxz+tor-anti-censorship-team--- via anti-censorship-team wrote:
recently, there was an interesting side note on the cryptography mailing list [1]. Quote:
(People have written code to predict what continent an anonymous person using Tor is on, based on noticing over a period of time when
their remote system clocks ran faster or slower, assuming that was caused by nighttime versus daytime temperatures.)
I was wondering if any of you know about this and where I could find code that does this? Any links to research and papers would be highly appreciated, too.
Especially, I'm wondering how they do this:
- via differences in the above mentioned system clock (impressive?!)
- timing analysis with latency? things like lower latency in Europe as there
are more tor relays around compared to Argentina.
- do you need to have any prerequisites? e.g. controlling at least one node,
or the exit node, or a "clear text" server/hidden service that someone connects to?
It sounds like they are referring to "Hot or Not: Revealing Hidden Services by their Clock Skew" from 2006.
https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/#HotOrNot
Section 5.3 is about geolocation.
Longitude could simply be found by finding the daily peak temperature to establish local time. To find latitude, the change in day length over a reasonably long period could be used. ... national holidays or when daylight saving time comes into effect might be evident