A team of security researchers announced to have developed Astoria, a new Tor client designed to beat the NSA and reduce the efficiency of timing attacks.

Tor and Deep web are becoming terms even popular among Internet users, the use of anonymizing network is constantly increasing for this reason intelligence agencies are focusing their efforts in its monitoring.

Edward Snowden has revealed that intelligence agencies belonging to the Five Eyes Alliance have tried to exploit several techniques to de-anonymized Tor users.

Today I desire to introduce you the result of the work of a joint effort of security researchers from American and Israeli organizations which have developed a new advanced Tor client called Astoria.

The Astoria Tor Client was specially designed to protect Tor user form surveillance activities, it implements a series of features that make eavesdropping harder.

Tor Network today is sustained via a volunteer network of more than 6000 relays/nodes, according to the Tor Metrics the number of Tor users is slightly more than two hundred thousand, as reported in the graph below.

The Tor traffic is protected implementing hop by hop encryption and by routing data through multiple relay servers in an unpredictable way.

Tor is vulnerable to a specific class of attacks known as “timing attacks” that are impossible to completely eliminate, but the idea behind Tor Astoria is to minimize the exposure to threat actors that are monitoring the Tor network.

Timing attacks request a significant effort to de-anonymize Tor users because they request the control of Tor servers representing the entry and exit relay servers of a Tor connection (aka circuit).