News recently broke that Tesco Bank's Android App refuses to run when Tor is also installed on the handset, presumably in the name of security.
So, out of morbid curiousity, I thought I'd take a quick look at just how effectively various banking apps were secured. Banks, after all, should be at the forefront of security (even if they often aren't)
To start with a disclaimer - personally, I think using banking services on any mobile device is a bad idea from the outset, and some of the results definitely support that idea. I've only taken a cursory look, and not made any attempt to dis-assemble any of the apps.
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Published: Wednesday, 10 August 2016 17:04
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Written by Ben Tasker
Last year I started experimenting with the idea of building a Hidden Service CDN.
People often complain that Tor is slow, though my domain sharding adjustments to the bentasker.co.uk onion have proven fairly effective in addressing page load times.
On the clearnet, the aim traditionally, is to try and direct the user to an edge-node close to them. That's obviously not possible for a Tor Hidden service to do (and even if it were, the users circuit might still take packets half-way across the globe). So, the primary aim is instead to spread load and introduce some redundancy.
One option for spreading load is to have a load balancer run Tor and then spread requests across the back-end. That, however, does nothing for redundancy if the load-balancer (or it's link) fails.
The main aim was to see what could be achieved in terms of scaling out a high traffic service. Raw data and more detailed analysis of the results can be seen here. Honestly speaking, It's not the most disciplined or structured research I've ever done, but the necessary information should all be there.
This document is essentially a high-level write up along with some additional observations
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Published: Saturday, 23 May 2015 01:43
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Written by Ben Tasker
Hidden Services have had something of a bad rap in the media of late, whilst it's undoubtedly true that some host some unpleasant material, the same can equally be said of the World Wide Web.
Hidden Services do have the potential to bring a much higher level of privacy to the end-user, and aren't always about hiding the origin from the user (or an attacker). The cryptography used in Tor's transport is arguably much stronger (and easier to change if found to be broken) that is available for HTTPS.
To that end, I thought it would be wise to configure the site to be multi-homed, that is to be accessible via both methods.
Because both are run by the same back-end, updates will appear on both at the same time.
So, you can now access BenTasker.co.uk at either
A link to the .onion has also been added to the Privacy bar on the left.
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