Anybody remember the guys who were supposed to show how they deanonymized tor users on a small budget?

Then they canceled all of a sudden? A Forbes article I read said that it's likely that the feds shut those researchers up due to the fact that they (feds) were using that exact method. This

Forbes article

Tl; Dr some grad school students were about to show us how tor can be broken on a small budget until the feds heard about their own method becoming public, then poof the talk by the students was canceled


Comments


[6 Points] kkkkkkk44444kk4444:

The researchers disclosed in so many words the attack to the Tor devs, it involved sending a signature of packets in a dataflow that was originally designed to prevent some sort of other attack, so by controlling a certain number of nodes they could eventually follow the packetflow to the real servers and back to the users, essentially deanonymizing the connections through tor. This is sort of the same issue with Five Eyes following the internets traffic, they can analyze dataflows for packet timing signatures and thereby deanonymize tor flows, but NSA/FiveEyes cannot deanonymize the contents of a connection itself, though depending on what you are connecting to (if they control or have influence over what you are connecting to) they may be able to decrypt this as well.

As of a couple months now the devs have patched this vulnerability, though timing attacks remain one of the bigger problems tor still faces.

edit: Im guessing OP is writing this in relation to recent events, this attack did reveal hidden service locations and what hidden services users were connecting to, the Tor devs announced all hidden services change servers. Chances are this is what they used to locate these hidden servers and the ones that got taken down are the ones that didnt bother to move.

edit2: Now that i think about it the timing seems to make sense, they announced this in a vague announcement over 6 months ago in spring 2014. This must of caught LEA attention and they forced the researchers to disclose it, then when they attempted to disclose the method LEA came down on the school and the schools lawyers stepped in to stop them. Makes sense as the subsequent Tor patch and server move call as it had turned out probably had mitigated some of the damage from their investigation.


[1 Points] shady_varchar:

Well honestly they weren't very smart about it. Should have just kept their mouths shut till it was time to show the world what they knew. Now the Fucking fbi has been involved and who knows how long it will take to find the method and patch it.