The German police have successfully deanonymized at least four Tor users. It appears they watch known Tor relays and known suspects, and use timing analysis to figure out who is using what relay. T…

The German police have successfully deanonymized at least four Tor users. It appears they watch known Tor relays and known suspects, and use timing analysis to figure out who is using what relay.
Tor has written about this.
Hacker News thread.

  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
    742·
    25 days ago

    Bad post.

    A: old news

    B: massively misleading headline missing important context

    C: Most likely partially fabricated by law enforcement according to many experts and the tor project. They didnt execute a full timing attack because they are not capable of doing that.

    From the limited information The Tor Project has, we believe that one user of the long-retired application Ricochet was fully de-anonymized through a guard discovery attack. This was possible, at the time, because the user was using a version of the software that neither had Vanguards-lite, nor the vanguards addon, which were introduced to protect users from this type of attack. This protection exists in Ricochet-Refresh, a maintained fork of the long-retired project Ricochet, since version 3.0.12 released in June of 2022.

        • Imprint9816@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          4·
          25 days ago

          I doubt it. I think OP wanted upvotes and didn’t read carefully. Something like “tor user de-anonymized via retired app” would of been more accurate.

          This is another great lesson that even the best privacy tools can’t protect a user from their own bad opsec.

          It just sucks as a lot of Lemmy users will just read the title and assume its true and then tell their friends tor is no longer safe.

    • far_university190English
      2·
      25 days ago

      They say not given full access, so post from tor may not full picture.

      In interview daniel moßbrucker say that onion v3 was affect 2 time, so not only ricochet.

      Source for expert saying it fabricated?

      Source for government not capable of timing attack?

      Want to read up on more opinion on this.

      edit: if daniel moßbrucker trustworthy. might also fabricate story.

  • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
    151·
    25 days ago

    It’s worth noting that a sizeable number of Tor exit nodes are actually run by the German government. Meaning: they know exactly what’s going through those nodes.

    So all they need to do to unmask a Tor source IP is control the first hop too. They’re in a position where they can narrow searches down to activity they’re actually interested in without significantly decreasing the privacy of other Tor users, and then they can peel back the onion.

    This has been the case since shortly after Tor was created.

  • far_university190English
    6·
    25 days ago

    In contrast to the CCC, Chaos Computer Club, who was provided access to the documents related to the case and was able to analyze and validate the reporter’s assumptions, we were only provided a vague outline and asked broad clarifying questions that left us with uncertainty of the facts, and questions of our own.

    What the fuck

      • far_university190English
        11·
        25 days ago

        large club of people interested in technology

        edit: https://www.ccc.de/en/

        The Chaos Computer Club e. V. (CCC) is Europe’s largest association of hackers. For more than thirty years we are providing information about technical and societal issues, such as surveillance, privacy, freedom of information, hacktivism, data security and many other interesting things around technology and hacking issues. As the most influential hacker collective in Europe we organize campaigns, events, lobbying and publications as well as anonymizing services and communication infrastructure. There are many hackerspaces in and around Germany which belong to or share a common bond to the CCC as stated in our hacker ethics.