Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ricochet: Peer-to-peer instant messaging system built on Tor hidden services (2017)

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 36 posts

Re: Ricochet: Peer-to-peer instant messaging system built on Tor hidden services (2017)

#5

Post by karel-3d »

> From 2019 to 2021, Ricochet was used by the admins (as well as an undercover investigator) of the child porn onion site Boystown. To identify the perpetrators, German police used a correlation analysis attack. By sending Ricochet messages to perpetrators and monitoring several hundred Tor nodes for simultaneous traffic of the correct size, authorities were able to identify intermediate Tor nodes and then also the perpetrator's entry nodes, revealing the perpetrators' IP addresses.

From wikipedia.

Re: Ricochet: Peer-to-peer instant messaging system built on Tor hidden services (2017)

#6

Post by derbOac »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #4
aleksjess wrote: post #2

Looks like a good idea... sadly the latest release is from 8y ago. :(

I guess something like Cwtch would be an actively maintained equivalent. https://docs.cwtch.im/

Briar also can use Tor, among other things.

Re: Ricochet: Peer-to-peer instant messaging system built on Tor hidden services (2017)

#7

Post by karel-3d »

karel-3d wrote: post #5

> From 2019 to 2021, Ricochet was used by the admins (as well as an undercover investigator) of the child porn onion site Boystown. To identify the perpetrators, German police used a correlation analysis attack. By sending Ricochet messages to perpetrators and monitoring several hundred Tor nodes for simultaneous traffic of the correct size, authorities were able to identify intermediate Tor nodes and then also the p…

From the cited article

>It is still unclear from where, but the investigators apparently knew that the suspect was using O2 as his internet provider. They therefore chose a different approach: based on the correlation analysis of the middle node, they had already found out the IP address of the entry guard – and could hope that the suspect would continue to use it in the coming days and weeks. So the next time the suspect was online in Ricochet, all they had to do was ask Teleofnica for the addresses of all the O2 customers who were currently connected to this very Entry Guard. The result should have been a fairly short list.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Boystown-investigations-Catchin...

Re: Ricochet: Peer-to-peer instant messaging system built on Tor hidden services (2017)

#9

Post by johnisgood »

karel-3d wrote: post #5

> From 2019 to 2021, Ricochet was used by the admins (as well as an undercover investigator) of the child porn onion site Boystown. To identify the perpetrators, German police used a correlation analysis attack. By sending Ricochet messages to perpetrators and monitoring several hundred Tor nodes for simultaneous traffic of the correct size, authorities were able to identify intermediate Tor nodes and then also the p…

https://github.com/blueprint-freespeech/ricochet-refresh/iss...

Is it not related?

Post reply on HN