The talk about de-anonymizing Tor at the BlackHat conference has been removed
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: The talk about de-anonymizing Tor at the BlackHat conference has been removed
#2Wild conjecture. Most of the guys on CERT have a security clearance. This talk may have been viewed as crossing streams that he could not cross. He likely had to get the talk approved by whoever manages his clearance to ensure his talk is not leaking secret information. Someone further up the chain may have caught wind and pulled it.
Re: The talk about de-anonymizing Tor at the BlackHat conference has been removed
#3Speakers drop out all the time.
Or maybe someone didn't want to compromise Tor in public until the Tor project had a chance to address the issues.
Re: The talk about de-anonymizing Tor at the BlackHat conference has been removed
#4Speakers drop out all the time. Or maybe someone didn't want to compromise Tor in public until the Tor project had a chance to address the issues.
>>> Or maybe someone didn't want to compromise Tor in public until the Tor project had a chance to address the issues.
To some degree, isn't this what the Black Hat conference is all about?
Re: The talk about de-anonymizing Tor at the BlackHat conference has been removed
#5I doubt this removal is anything sinister. Attacks on Tor have been a relatively common theme at many large security conferences. For example, there was a presentation at IEEES&P 2013 on de-anonymizing Tor hidden services (http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2013/papers/4977a080.pdf). The Tor people are typically pretty open to this stuff. It was most likely removed due to something mundane, like the presenters having issues getting through their organization's bureaucracy.
Re: The talk about de-anonymizing Tor at the BlackHat conference has been removed
#6Speakers drop out all the time. Or maybe someone didn't want to compromise Tor in public until the Tor project had a chance to address the issues.
>>> Or maybe someone didn't want to compromise Tor in public until the Tor project had a chance to address the issues. To some degree, isn't this what the Black Hat conference is all about?
Seems to me the public ousting of projects only happens when they refuse to implement a fix, or deny that something's an issue.
Re: The talk about de-anonymizing Tor at the BlackHat conference has been removed
#7Mid summer tends to be pullout season for Blackhat and Defcon speakers. A handful happen every year, thats why they have alternates.
Sometimes the speakers screwed up and didn't get their material together and they weren't important enough to ignore that. Other times they're threatened by their employer or some external forces.
Subway hacking, Padgets RFID (and GSM a few years later IIRC), etc. Theres quite a history of great presentations that have never happened for one reason or another.
Re: The talk about de-anonymizing Tor at the BlackHat conference has been removed
#8A Black Hat spokeswoman told Reuters that the talk had been canceled at the request of lawyers for Carnegie-Mellon University, where the speakers work as researchers. A CMU spokesman had no immediate comment.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/21/cybercrime-confere...
Re: The talk about de-anonymizing Tor at the BlackHat conference has been removed
#9A Black Hat spokeswoman told Reuters that the talk had been canceled at the request of lawyers for Carnegie-Mellon University, where the speakers work as researchers. A CMU spokesman had no immediate comment. Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/21/cybercrime-confere...
Thank you for the information packetlss!
http://www.qatar.cmu.edu/iliano/svc/meetings/PX/2004-09-21/s... http://www.cmu.edu/silicon-valley/research/tech-showcase/pdf...
Re: The talk about de-anonymizing Tor at the BlackHat conference has been removed
#10At this point it is not really a good idea to use Tor anyways, given that you are then automatically targeted by the NSA and at the same time potentially provide cover for covert operations of several countries. What is really needed is political action to limit the capabilities of security agencies to indiscriminantly monitor web traffic.