Apparently TOR is crackable

Following on from this longish thread on VPNs, it appears that hiding oneself using TOR is far from secure.

Some criminal suspects on Tor have been unmasked by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement or intelligence agencies using a variety of techniques, including tampering with software often used alongside Tor.
...
...
... dozens of successes, including cases where suspected child pornographers and drug dealers had been found.

In the best-known Tor case, U.S. authorities in October shut down online drug bazaar Silk Road, a so-called hidden service reachable only via Tor.

Linky.

Edit - typo in Subject.

Edited by RobertoS (Mon 28-Jul-14 22:41:18)

http://www.wired.com/2013/11/silk-road/

Edited by deleted (Mon 28-Jul-14 22:41:55)

Yes, but all they mention in your link is the normal gathering info from users' computers after a tip-off.

This is about the researchers being able to hack into TOR. Which is why the talk was pulled - the authorities don't want methods revealing.

Some do http://news.sky.com/story/1307456/russia-offers-rewa...

It was back up within days and still up last time I looked, though not looked for a month or two. Tails is better.
Edit- Just checked. Still up and running. http://youtu.be/pLpC1aZaQa8

Edited by professor973 (Tue 29-Jul-14 00:53:47)

Ooops! I forgot about that one. A big article about it in Monday's Times as well.

There's also one I haven't read yet, "The West is leaderless and Putin knows it".

(I think I said something similar many months ago, about no Western politician approaching being a match for him. Can't find it right now).

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Following on from this longish thread on VPNs, it appears that hiding oneself using TOR is far from secure.

Some criminal suspects on Tor have been unmasked by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement or intelligence agencies using a variety of techniques, including tampering with software often used alongside Tor.
...
...
... dozens of successes, including cases where suspected child pornographers and drug dealers had been found.

In the best-known Tor case, U.S. authorities in October shut down online drug bazaar Silk Road, a so-called hidden service reachable only via Tor.

Linky.

Edit - typo in Subject.

Tor itself doesn't appear to be crackable (yet?), but the article linked to below explains that US authorities are exploiting vulnerabilities in Tor users' browsers, which was probably what was going to be covered at that Black Hat security conference.

Attacking Tor: how the NSA targets users' online anonymity

Edited by deleted (Tue 29-Jul-14 12:51:32)

An excellent article, thanks .

However my belief is that the pulled paper would be about advances on those techniques. The researchers would not have been invited to present a paper on just what is already in the public domain.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

However my belief is that the pulled paper would be about advances on those techniques. The researchers would not have been invited to present a paper on just what is already in the public domain.

I agree that is what is likely the pulled paper was about, and even that article I linked to gives indications that might be the case:-

"NSA were confident that they would be able to find a replacement Firefox exploit that worked against version 17.0 ESR."

So the likelihood (I believe) is that the pulled conference was about "man in the middle" type attacks and using browser vulnerabilities, rather than cracking Tor itself.