this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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51
Law Enforcement Deanonymizes Tor Users (www.schneier.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Bad post.

A: old news

B: 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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Yeah not sure why OP felt the need to use such a click-bait title.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Maybe OP is part of a law enforcement entity!!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

German feds cant maintain proper posture against russia so these limp dick cucks need some good PR?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks for this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Who the hell is the Chaos Computer Club

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Bundeskriminalamt

https://www.bka.de/EN/OurTasks/AreasOfCrime/Cybercrime/cybercrime_node.html

Government (Lodge & Station): their tots, you can't have!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks for linking the HN thread 👍