Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28526021

by theklub • 12 years ago

149 79 12 years ago

scrollaway• 12 years ago

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...

XorNot• 12 years ago

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.

homhomhom3• 12 years ago

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

tormeh• 12 years ago

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.

draugadrotten• 12 years ago

Assuming Russia can deanonymize Tor users, isn't this a way of finding out "who else out there can denonymize Tor users", and later question these people very gently "what else can you do?"

I wouldn't disclose something like this to the big boys , as it would reveal far too much about my own capabilities and/or connections.

uptown• 12 years ago

"or 2) Russia can, and this is a ruse to make us think they can't."

Even if they could ... why say anything at-all? Perhaps - to encourage use of an exploitable method of communication, but even-then why would somebody looking to hide use a form of communication they know is actively being targeted by the government they're looking to evade?

asdfologist• 12 years ago

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

xyclos• 12 years ago

maybe that is their goal. Perhaps they want to (or already are) use(ing) tor to hide their own activities from the NSA. They want to make sure what they are doing is truly as secure as it claims to be and if not motivate devs to make it so. After all, it seems it would be cheaper to offer this small reward than to have to pay full time employees to help keep their activities secure from prying eyes.

valarauca1• 12 years ago

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.

hucker• 12 years ago

"Applicants must pay 195,000 roubles to enter the competition"

This seems rather bizarre... ~$5500 cannot simply be a symbolic sum to deter idiots.

mkup• 12 years ago

IMO Russians intend to make their venture profitable.

jessaustin2• 12 years ago

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.

tim333• 12 years ago

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

Steuard• 12 years ago

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.

jcromartie• 12 years ago

The "hackathon" spirit has caught on at the state level. Get a bunch of college kids to slave away for free and give the best one a paltry sum for their efforts and retain all rights to the work.

aroman• 12 years ago

How is that the "hackathon" spirit?

don_draper• 12 years ago

They should have just put the proposal on elance

JulianMorrison2• 12 years ago

They may not intend to pay it. Just inspiring worries about the safety of TOR might be enough for their nefarious purposes.

scarmig• 12 years ago

I saw this headline and immediately thought, "that's much too low."

But I've got no idea how much that vulnerability would actually go for. Millions? Tens of millions? Anyone with a stronger understanding of the market have any rough estimate?

cantankerous• 12 years ago

I'm like you, I'm not sure how to assign a dollar value to this vulnerability. The implications of a broken TOR are huge for all players, especially over time. Considering TOR protects the livelihood (and lives even) of so many people who employ it, it doesn't seem unreasonable to put the ticket price up in the tens of millions to me. TOR's mission-critical for the work of a lot of folks, shady-dealings or no.

VeejayRampay• 12 years ago

I'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.

PerfectDlite• 12 years ago

They _had_ this community.

Nowadays most of them emigrated and those who don't, they mostly will not work for KGB spooks.

sarciszewski• 12 years ago

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

dm22• 12 years ago

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.

homhomhom3• 12 years ago

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

dm22• 12 years ago

I don't understand, it seems like researchers have to pay to enter and then are only given the funding if successful, that's not exactly funding R&D, more of a contest. It seems really strange that Russia would be offering this kind of bounty in effort to improve the program's security, don't they know how many activists and dissidents use it. Is the sole reason to aid their own spies?

They should just provide funds on a site such as https://hackerone.com/

I really wish the US government would offer bounties for their sites and systems. Right now if people try to exploit a US government system, even if they have the intention to properly disclose the vulnerability they face prosecution.

golergka• 12 years ago

Previous thread about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8079195

Ecio78• 12 years ago

I submitted this one as well but was not very successful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8083790

kar-kub• 12 years ago

Last 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 contributed a further $1m. Those amounts are roughly the same as in 2012."

I'm not familiar at all how those founding works, could someone, from US, explain how and why US government is giving money to TOR?

noblethrasher2• 12 years ago

Well, TOR was originally developed by the US Naval Research Lab for the purpose of securing government comms.

Source: https://www.torproject.org/about/overview

bjelkeman-again• 12 years ago

I was of a slightly different impression, but have no idea what is the "truth".

"Tor was not started by the US Navy. The US Naval Research Labs (NRL) started a project in the 1990s called onion routing7. Tor uses the basic onion routing principles and applies them to the Internet. The volunteer Tor group started in 2001. The formal charity, The Tor Project, started in 2006. We continue to work with Dr. Paul Syverson from NRL on improving onion routing and therefore Tor."

Source: https://blog.torproject.org/category/tags/sida

cookiecaper• 12 years ago

"Securing government comms" can be misleading. Tor is not by itself a secure channel, but may be part of a secure channel if you're concerned that a local or semi-local adversary may intercept your communications. My understanding is that Tor was developed primarily to facilitate informants and dissidents in countries with restrictive internet access policies, like China, who would not take kindly to seeing communications between Chinese IPs and U.S. military IPs.

There is a very widespread and dangerous misconception that Tor is a one-stop shop for secure or anonymous communication. This is not true. You need to encrypt your messages separately. When outside the onion network, Tor actually exposes all content sent through it to a third-party, the exit node. This means using Tor may be more dangerous than not using Tor if you don't know what you're doing.

JasonIpswitch• 12 years ago

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.

Kalium• 12 years ago

I should think that both are likely true.

chris_mahan2• 12 years ago

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?

ForHackernews• 12 years ago

Isn't there a third possibility that US security services are capable of breaking Tor, and want to popularize it in order to encourage Tor usage among potential targets?

pinkyand• 12 years ago

Two possible motivations:

1. Help political dissent in countries that cannot crack tor.

2. There's a reasonable chance that they can crack tor, at least to some extent ,especially with the help of the 5-eyes countries. Having that ability while "evildoers" think tor is safe is valuable.

AJ007• 12 years ago

It isn't just FUD, there are some serious questions that have been raised which are ignored by the EFF crowd. At the bare minimum it has been used as an intelligence honeypot because most users have no idea what they are doing. Google, FB, and so on forcing SSL may have reduced this value a little bit.

middleclick2• 12 years ago

What are these questions?

orbifold2• 12 years ago

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 that almost all TOR traffic is monitored by the NSA. The tradeoff is that while TOR makes it slightly harder to identify targets, the majority of them use TOR and there are still ways to identify them if they are not extremely careful (this has been revealed in some of Snowdens documents).

hackuser• 12 years ago

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?

pandaman• 12 years ago

All the sources refer the same government requisition for a "performing the scientific research, code "TORUS/Fleet". The details should be available for people who chose to participate and foreign nationals are specifically banned from participation.

With the Russian word for torus being "тор" which could be transliterated as "tor" I see why people might get excited. But I'd like to see something more concrete than word play to support the news articles' theory.

prima-facie• 12 years ago

I bet NSA is willing to pay much more.

nanoscopic• 12 years ago

I already posted publicly online how to find the identity of a Tor user.

To reiterate:

1. Get the Tor user in question to visit a website controlled by you ( or at least a site where you can cause JS to run; such as an advertisement )

2. Know which ISP the user is on, and be allowed to install a high speed device watching all traffic for a sequence of specific sized packets.

3. Use the JS to send a specifically crafted sequence of sized packets with specific time periods in between them. After sending this preamble, send sized packets to send the 'pseudo identity' of the user ( whatever pseudonym you wish to attach back to their real IP )

4. Use your monitored ISP device to detect the preamble, then log IP and the data.

Note this method could be done en-masse and would only require high speed FPGA devices at each ISP "trunk". Inject JS code correlating users back for any system which you wish to identify the users.

Done. Whichever Russian demonstrates this and wins the $100k; throw me a bone please. :)

jonahx• 12 years ago

I assume a Tor user with js turned off would be immune to this?

robertfw• 12 years ago

I wonder if something similar could be done with detecting specifically sized images?

leonh2• 12 years ago

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.

malka• 12 years ago

( or at least a site where you can cause JS to run; such as an advertisement )

So you cannot find the identity of a tor user.

* Either the TOR user is a 'newbie' (no offense), and he will use the tor package wich come with a version of firefox where JS is disabled by default

* Either he is a seasoned user and knows that disabling JS while using TOR is mandatory.

mseebach• 12 years ago

I don't know the exact parameters of the competition, but I doubt pretty strongly if the solution is allowed to manipulate the targeted user's behavior, and, oh, by the way, install a high speed listening device on the trunk of every ISP in the world.

If you have to know already which ISP the suspected user is using, you're not really finding the user, you're just confirming their identity.

And as others have pointed out, running with JS enabled is a vulnerability. If the user is that careless, it's probably easier to get them to load a particular file over plain HTTP and just listening to requests for that file.

broolstoryco• 12 years ago

2. Know which ISP the user is on

How easy would it be to do this (even with JS on)?

JulianMorrison2• 12 years ago

Even simpler: create a website which responds in a recognizable way, serially rather than concurrently. If person A received recognizable packet P at time T, and the site was serially serving that connection at time T to recognizable-but-pseudonymous person X, then A==X.

daj40• 12 years ago

I don't know why anyone would do this for $110,000. Especially after the entry fee, probably wouldn't make much money after the hardware costs, though if you're good enough to take on TOR, you probably also have a botnet. Also, why the hell would anyone give it to the Russians? Of all people, they're definitely who need exclusive access to a TOR hack. Especially if you consider that some of those people who are using it in Russia could be regular people who are trying to not be persecuted for their sexual orientation. Bad idea overall.

coledubz• 12 years ago

ugh, capitalism. someone somewhere will actually do work towards this goal with that much money in mind as a worthwhile payoff. ending tor anonymity should have at least 2 more 0s on the end of the figure.

downandout• 12 years ago

They are also charging an entry fee for this "contest" in addition to the prize being ridiculously small. The good news is that it's quite unlikely this will be successful regardless of the prize.

goatforce5• 12 years ago

I'd assume you wouldn't have to look to hard to find someone willing to pay $110k+ to identify specific individual Tor users, let alone find general exploits in Tor.

EGreg• 12 years ago

Must be some small agency there, not really representing "Russia"

And anyway why cant people then just use Freenet or some such network?

clarry• 12 years ago

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.

thothamon• 12 years ago

Great news. $110,000 from Russia to find and (although they did not intend it) patch Tor bugs. Thanks, Putin!

a-nikolaev• 12 years ago

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.

drzaiusapelord• 12 years ago

Right, someone's CS drop out cousin is getting this.

d0mine• 12 years ago

I 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. </quote>

chris_mahan2• 12 years ago

Are 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.

Russia offers $110,000 to crack Tor anonymous network

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