Domain Name Resolution is a Tor Attack Vector

The article is about Tor not being as anonymous as many think. Tor users can be identified through Tor’s use of DNS or by deploying a Tor sniffer at ‘internet scale.’ The article gets more in depth about how DNS requests aren’t encrypted. Defec Tor are attacks that exploit the DNS requests lack of encryption. If these attacks monitor egress and ingress traffic, then the attack can easily map the user’s DNS traffic. If the DNS traffic map is used in conjunction with website fingerprinting it becomes even more potent. The article mentions a few suggestions to help mitigate this problem which you can see at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/04/domain_name_resolution_is_a_tor_attack_vector_but_dont_worry/

I stumbled upon this article while I was looking for sniffer related news articles. While this article isn’t explicitly about sniffers I found it interesting because, while I don’t know much about Tor, I understand its supposed to provide anonymous web browsing. The article makes me wonder if its really possible to be 100% anonymous on the web. I know you can utilize VPNs, Proxys, etc to help with anonymity, but how secure are they, what vulnerabilities do they have?