Privacy

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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] 74 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 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.

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