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Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network

bbc.com

11–20 of 87 posts

Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network

#11
Heh. This is low-ball. I was once offered $150,000 in a discussion with a broker when I inquired about a hypothetical Tor 0day. After the broker's fees, I would have still walked away with $120,000 if I had one. (Then taxes, of course.)

If anyone wants to do this, I recommend shopping around first ;P

Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network

#12
post #8
post #5

"Applicants must pay 195,000 roubles to enter the competition" This seems rather bizarre... ~$5500 cannot simply be a symbolic sum to deter idiots.

IMO Russians intend to make their venture profitable.

It wasn't clear to me from the article that there was any sort of time limit. Presumably a researcher could simply enter the contest once he was sure he had an exploit? The math doesn't really work out for profitability.

Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network

#13
post #8
post #5

"Applicants must pay 195,000 roubles to enter the competition" This seems rather bizarre... ~$5500 cannot simply be a symbolic sum to deter idiots.

IMO Russians intend to make their venture profitable.

Or probably the guy who thought of this is hoping for the odd $5500 in his bank account

Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network

#15
post #4

As Schneier says: "The reward of $114,000 seems pretty cheap for this capability. And we now get to debate whether 1) Russia cannot currently deaonymize Tor users, or 2) Russia can, and this is a ruse to make us think they can't." https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/07/russia_paying...

That's because they're asking if someone's done it and wants some cash. If you had, monetizing the knowledge isn't exactly easy. No intelligence agency will bother paying for it.

It's a closed tender, so that's hardly a possibility.

Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network

#16
post #6

How on Earth is $110,000 a reasonable value for this level of vulnerability? (And with a multi-thousand dollar up front cost to boot.) I'm not remotely an expert on security, much less nefarious black-market hacks, but I would think that a whole lot of nations around the world would be willing to pay millions (each!) for this capability. Heck, if not for this, I would have included Russia on that list.

[deleted]

Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network

#17
What's to stop someone from selling one of these exploits to multiple nations and companies?

What is the normal process for selling these exploits? They'd want to see the exploit first, I'm guessing in person, then they transfer over the money, then you give the code and details?

What if someone wanted to remain anonymous during the transaction? What would be the best method of doing that? You couldn't really send a friend because it might be easy to trace back to you, and it would be hard to trust a stranger.

Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network

#18
post #17

What's to stop someone from selling one of these exploits to multiple nations and companies? What is the normal process for selling these exploits? They'd want to see the exploit first, I'm guessing in person, then they transfer over the money, then you give the code and details? What if someone wanted to remain anonymous during the transaction? What would be the best method of doing that? You couldn't really send a…

They don't want to 'buy' the exploit outright, just fund the R&D. Thank you sensationalist media.

Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network

#19

I wonder if this would backfire and make Tor even stronger, as now even more attention is given to Tor's robustness.

It likely will, open source projects are nearly impossible to stop. The SSL/TLS standard and their associated standards and clients has shrugged off a number of attacks at surprising speeds. Patch cycles are measured in hours or days apposed to weeks or months.

If the attack is particularity disastrous then there will likely be a large fork. But once a project is started and a community built its unlikely that force will be stopped.

Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network

#20
post #4

As Schneier says: "The reward of $114,000 seems pretty cheap for this capability. And we now get to debate whether 1) Russia cannot currently deaonymize Tor users, or 2) Russia can, and this is a ruse to make us think they can't." https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/07/russia_paying...

That's because they're asking if someone's done it and wants some cash. If you had, monetizing the knowledge isn't exactly easy. No intelligence agency will bother paying for it.

Why wouldn't they? This is exactly the stuff I'd want to pay for if I was an intelligence agency; you want the hackers to come back with more exploits, after all.
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