Russia Is Offering Big Bucks to De-Anonymize Tor

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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The Russian government has put out the call for anyone to make an application capable of identifying users of Tor to access the Internet. The winner of the project will receive about $111K for their solution to Tor’s anonymity from the Russian government and probably the scrutiny of the NSA to boot. :D

Tor is used by journalists, activists, and of course people conducting illegal activities. In Russia it’s been an especially useful tool against censorship.
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Skripka said:
Only $111K?
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Also from surplus Soviet rubles. :p

109K, 110K, 111K.... Here's your reward kiddo.


But these aren't Russian rubles....


My bad, let me fix that for you....


Breaking news Ukraine military kills Russian civilian....
 
and whoever cashes it in is a monster and should be shot here in the US TOR is mostly used for questionable activities but in place like Russia it is the only way for people to speak out safely against their government.

And you never know someday it maybe the only safetynet for people here too you would have to be some sort of a monster to actually help a regime as brutal and inhumane as Putins to gain any more power.
 
They need to offer a bigger reward, then maybe someone from the NSA would try to collect it.
 
kinjo said:
and whoever cashes it in is a monster and should be shot here in the US TOR is mostly used for questionable activities but in place like Russia it is the only way for people to speak out safely against their government.

And you never know someday it maybe the only safetynet for people here too you would have to be some sort of a monster to actually help a regime as brutal and inhumane as Putins to gain any more power.
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Quoted for truth. If I had a solution that I could cash in, I would sooner destroy it than see it in hands like those.
 
That's odd, this is something I would picture the US government to do, more than Russia, though the US government would probably be more generous and offer like 1 mil.
 
TOR is not secure any one thinking it is, is an id10T. All programs have to use a process to return the message TOR is the same. In every message is the info necessary to find the original point of access, on that machine is info to find the user info. As long as that machine is still actively sending info it can be spoofed into sending the info back to a fake user account with a request for a new password. Once you do that you simply log in and resend all the users messages to the fake user. In those messages are the means to find the user's computer.

I'm not sure you could do that with an app but any decent hacker could do it in a few minutes. The whole point of TOR was to make it hard enough that people would not bother, not to make it impossible because someone will always figure it out no matter how go the mousetrap, simply because in order for communication to work the computers need to know where to send the message and replies.
 
B.. B... But Russia gave Snoden a place to stay because they love privacy so much. So much for that theory.
 
With security being a myth, and with countries hating this so much it must at least be partially working.
 
It's kinda funny that anyone in Russia is working under the misconception that TOR actually works. Then again, there are people who think wrapping their web traffic in a VPN service somehow protects their communications from people who wanna know.
 
jpm100 said:
B.. B... But Russia gave Snoden a place to stay because they love privacy so much. So much for that theory.
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Hopefully no one believed that. Putin only allowed Snowden in because he thought Snowden would give him juicy secrets. Putin was kind of right, but he was still wrong. Putin wanted that, and he knew it would piss off Barack Obama.

Russia somehow manages to be a worse first world country than America. Somehow.
 
kinjo said:
and whoever cashes it in is a monster and should be shot here in the US TOR is mostly used for questionable activities but in place like Russia it is the only way for people to speak out safely against their government.
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TOR is probably very rarely used for actual crimes (by actual crimes I am excluding fake crimes like drug usage or gambling or pornography) in any country. Just because some random governments create crimes out of activities that have no victims doesn't make TOR wrong.

I bet in the US TOR is mostly used to anonymise the slacking off techies are doing at their job or something like that, haha.
 
I am no expert on TOR.

But I thought that TOR was a honeypot created by the NSA/CIA? So the Russians are trying to "out" the NSA/TOR? Maybe get people to stop using it?
 
It was made by the US Navy. The NSA leaks indicated they have tried to crack it but have not fully done so yet. If it was as easy to crack as some arm chair commandos (drakken above) would claim, then perhaps they should step forward and claim some reward money. There are many out there who would love to see it fully broken. That is not to say that it is flawless (it is well known that if enough of the nodes are controlled, one could monitor how the traffic is being routed), but to say that "any decent hacker could do it in a few minutes" is pure shit.
 
NSA isn't cracking it so much as infiltrating it, I think. Get enough of your own servers into their network and you've got a decent amount of data that you can trace.
 
Next up: Obama offers reward for anyone who can crack the Bitcoin algorithm.
 
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