Bear in mind that in Russia, many "offers" like this are not ment to be real competitions for accomplishing something (to crack Tor, to build a bridge, etc), but simply a way to appropriate state's money.
Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network
71–80 of 87 posts
Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network
#72I don't think that you need to crack anything.
$100,000 is for a research paper.
Translation of the auction lot title: "Research the possibility of getting technical information about Tor users (their hardware)".
Here's the talk that claims the possibility to deanonymize Tor users for less than $3,000 http://web.archive.org/web/20140705114447/http://blackhat.co...
There are published papers on the topic e.g., http://www.syverson.org/tor-vulnerabilities-iccs.pdf
Lesson one is that Tor guards against traffic analysis not traffic confirmation. If there is reason to suspect that a client is talking to a destination over Tor, it is trivial to confirm this by watching them both.
Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume a Tor user with js turned off would be immune to this?
I don't think so. What you could do is have the webserver set up chunked encoding on a resource (say an image) and vary the size of the chunks for each user.
I thought Tor padded all packets to obscure payload size. Is this not true, or does this method work in some other way I'm not grokking?
Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network
#74Are we saying that Russian intelligence services cannot hack TOR and need some random hacker to do it?
Imagine if the CIA offered $1M to crack TOR. They would be the laughingstock of the intelligence community.
I think there is something else going on. I would not touch this. It looks like bait.
Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network
#75Last paragraphs are very interesting: "In its 2013 financial statements, the Tor Project - a group of developers that maintain tools used to access Tor - confirmed that the US Department of Defense remained one its biggest backers. The DoD sent $830,000 (£489,000) to the group through SRI International, which describes itself as an independent non-profit research centre, last year. Other parts of the US government co…
I've seen two explanations for why the US government gives money to the Tor Project. One reason is to support dissidents in countries like China. Another is that US agents use Tor, but that the network requires a degree of popularity in order for agents to "hide" in it.
Another option is an effort to identify cryptographically-capable individuals around the works as targets for potential contact, work, on behalf of the U.S. and its allies.
TOR as a recruitment tool?
Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that the "hackathon" spirit?
It's the spirit ever since the term "hackaton" caught the attention of the employers and the events are organized by companies for their profit instead of hobbysts/enthusiasts just for fun.
For ex: Hackathon's shouldn't primarily be about cash prizes. It defeats the purpose and ideology behind hacking culture.
Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network
#77Last paragraphs are very interesting: "In its 2013 financial statements, the Tor Project - a group of developers that maintain tools used to access Tor - confirmed that the US Department of Defense remained one its biggest backers. The DoD sent $830,000 (£489,000) to the group through SRI International, which describes itself as an independent non-profit research centre, last year. Other parts of the US government co…
The primary intended purpose of the tor network was to provide cover for US agents. Many of the core developers of TOR have at various times either directly worked for US intelligence or have been funded by them. It was opened to the public and popularized, because an anomization network that is only used by spies is pointless. Most of the current exit nodes are currently located in the US, so there is no question th…
> The primary intended purpose of the tor network was to provide cover for US agents. Many of the core developers of TOR have at various times either directly worked for US intelligence or have been funded by them
That's very interesting. Could you provide sources that back this up, especially the employment history of TOR developers?
Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network
#78Must be some small agency there, not really representing "Russia" And anyway why cant people then just use Freenet or some such network?
Freenet is a resource hog, and can be rather slow. It's also not particularly interesting for people who just want to browse and access the "normal" web anonymously. There are few services. There's little interesting content.. Plus it's not clear Freenet can really provide that much as far as anonymity goes. The consensus recently has been that opennet is quite vulnerable, and the only way to be really safe out there is with a global darknet where everyone only connects to trusted peers. Achieving this is not so easy, and there are potential complications.
Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network
#79I'd be really surprised if Russia were actually not able to do this already, they're known for having a very strong national community of security experts and overall excellent mathematicians.
They _had_ this community.
Nowadays most of them emigrated and those who don't, they mostly will not work for KGB spooks.
Re: Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the spirit ever since the term "hackaton" caught the attention of the employers and the events are organized by companies for their profit instead of hobbysts/enthusiasts just for fun.
For ex: Hackathon's shouldn't primarily be about cash prizes. It defeats the purpose and ideology behind hacking culture.
Isn't that the parent comment's point? That it's such a relatively small amount of money that the only people who are into hacking stuff anyway would attempt it.