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An Anonymous Coward and takyon write:

Wired and others are reporting on a Tor blog post claiming that Carnegie Mellon University researchers were paid by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to help attack Tor hidden services:

"Apparently these researchers were paid by the FBI to attack hidden services users in a broad sweep, and then sift through their data to find people whom they could accuse of crimes," Dingledine writes. "Such action is a violation of our trust and basic guidelines for ethical research. We strongly support independent research on our software and network, but this attack crosses the crucial line between research and endangering innocent users."

Tor's statement all but confirms that Carnegie Mellon's attack was used in the late 2014 law enforcement operation known as Operation Onymous, carried out by the FBI and Europol. That dark web purge took down dozens of Tor hidden services, including several of the most popular Tor-based black markets for drugs including the Silk Road 2, and led to at least 17 arrests. Tor, for its part, has made efforts to subsequently block the attack, which it says it first detected in July of 2014.

When WIRED contacted Carnegie Mellon, it didn't deny the Tor Project's accusations, but pointed to a lack of evidence. "I'd like to see the substantiation for their claim," said Ed Desautels, a staffer in the public relations department of the university's Software Engineering Institute. "I'm not aware of any payment," he added, declining to comment further.

Tor's Dingledine responded to that call for evidence by telling WIRED that it identified Carnegie Mellon as the origin of the attack by pinpointing servers running on Tor's network that were used in the de-anonymization technique. When it asked Carnegie Mellon if the servers were being run by its researchers—a suspicion based on the canceled Black Hat conference presentation—the anomalous servers disappeared from the network and the university offered no response. The $1 million payment, Dingledine says, was revealed to Tor by "friends in the security community."

Previously:

July 26, 2014: Russia Offers $111,000 to Break TOR Anonymity Network
September 30, 2014: Tor Executive Hints at Firefox Integration
November 8, 2014: Huge Raid to Shut Down 400-plus DarkNet Sites
November 10, 2014: Tor Project Mulls How Feds Took Down Hidden Websites
November 17, 2014: Is Tor a Honeypot?
December 22, 2014: Servers Seized After Tor Developers Warn of Potential Government Attempt To Take Down Network

Original Submission

1. "takyon" - https://soylentnews.org/~takyon/
2. "Wired" - http://www.wired.com/2015/11/tor-says-feds-paid-carnegie-mellon-1m-to-help-unmask-users/
3. "others" - http://m.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/12/fbi_paid_bounty_to_hack_tor_project/
4. "Tor blog post" - https://blog.torproject.org/blog/did-fbi-pay-university-attack-tor-users
5. "known as Operation Onymous" - http://www.wired.com/2014/11/operation-onymous-dark-web-arrests/
6. "says it first detected in July of 2014" - https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-security-advisory-relay-early-traffic-confirmation-attack
7. "Russia Offers $111,000 to Break TOR Anonymity Network" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/07/26/0531235
8. "Tor Executive Hints at Firefox Integration" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/09/30/1052211
9. "Huge Raid to Shut Down 400-plus DarkNet Sites" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/11/08/154250
10. "Tor Project Mulls How Feds Took Down Hidden Websites" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/11/10/1510242
11. "Is Tor a Honeypot?" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/11/17/1027233
12. "Servers Seized After Tor Developers Warn of Potential Government Attempt To Take Down Network" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/12/22/0844232
13. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=10593

printed from SoylentNews, Tor Says Feds Paid Carnegie Mellon $1M to Help Unmask Users on 2024-04-24 23:53:42