US court case reveals Tor attack deal

The FBI made security researchers hand over data that helped identify people suspected of using the Tor anonymising network, a court case has revealed.

It used a court order to access data gathered by two researchers during a 2014 Carnegie Mellon University project funded by the US Department of Defense.

The home IP address of American Brian Farrell was among those obtained by the FBI via its analysis of the CMU data.

He denies helping to run the Silk Road 2.0 website, which sold drugs via Tor.

Tor, also known as The Onion Router, lets people browse the web anonymously by bouncing data through a series of routers that encrypt it at each step.

This has also given rise to a number of hidden sites, including many markets selling drugs and other illegal items and services, that sit on the Tor network.

Once identified, the researchers said they would give a talk at the Black Hat security conference about the methods they had used to "de-anonymise hundreds of thousands Tor clients and thousands of hidden services".

The talk never went ahead - but later in 2014, the FBI mounted a series of raids on people suspected of running sites sitting on Tor.

The revelation comes as the FBI is embroiled in a row with Apple over a request to unlock an iPhone that belonged to Syed Rizwan Farook who, with his wife, killed 14 people in California last year.

The trial against Mr Farrell is due to start in April...

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35658761

Black Hat Cancels Presentation on Cracking Tor

A presentation at the Black Hat conference about weaknesses within the Tor network has been canceled.

Alexander Volynkin, a researcher with CERT/Carnegie Mellon, was scheduled to give a talk titled "You Don't Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget" at the hacker conference, which kicks off Aug. 2.

But conference organizers this week announced that the presentation has been pulled form the lineup after the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and Carnegie Mellon University informed them that "the materials that [Volynkin] would be speaking about have not yet [been] approved by CMU/SEI for public release..."

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2461204,00.asp

Dave Farber, Internet’s “Grandfather,” Seeks to Cut through Fog of Cyberwar

Over the last few years, the rhetoric if not the actuality of cyberwarfare has been escalating. Every day, it seems, the media report on alleged cyberattacks–by nations, terrorist organizations or criminal gangs–against U.S. governmental institutions and corporations. Many of these allegations are being made by individuals or groups thatstand to benefit from increased funding for cybersecurity, and whose claims cannot be verified because details are classified.

Seeking guidance, I turned to legendary computer scientist Dave Farber, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who has also worked for or with Bell Labs, Rand, the FCC, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and many other institutions. Farber is sometimes called the “Grandfather of the Internet” both because of his pioneering work in distributed computing and his mentoring of graduate students who helped build the Internet. He remains deeply involved in debates over how to maximize benefits and minimize risks of the Internet. (SeeFarber’s resume on Wikipedia.)

I have gotten to know Farber because he is an active alumnus of Stevens Institute of Technology, where I teach. I am also on a listserve that he moderates, “Interesting People.” What follows is my summary of our recent conversation in New York City...

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/06/06/dave-farber-internets-grandfather-seeks-to-cut-through-fog-of-cyberwar/