Russian Government Is Looking For Ways To Crack Tor

The Russian government has offered almost four million roubles (£81,600) to anyone who can suggest a method of tracking the users of the anonymous Tor network.

According to the Russian daily RBK, the tender was issued by an agency of the Interior Ministry.

There have been countless attempts to break Tor encryption and traffic routing protocols in the past, but is believed that identifying the network’s users remains impossible.

Last week, organisers of the Black Hat security conference cancelled a keynote which was apparently due to reveal how to track Tor users on a budget, after receiving a complaint from Carnegie Mellon University where this research was conducted.

The mighty Tor

The Tor Project is a free encrypted network that is believed to conceal a user’s location or Internet use from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.

Originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory, today the project hosts a variety of content, from news and secure communication services to drugs bazaars and things like The Hidden Wiki, a collection of illegal instructions and manuals.

The project simultaneously helps activists, dissidents and journalists to evade oppressive governments, while also enabling cyber criminals to conduct their dealings in secret.

Tor operates on donations from private contributors and organisations like Google and DARPA. The network is becoming increasingly popular in Russia, as citizens attempt to circumvent the ongoing Internet censorship campaign by the Kremlin.

The relatively small size of the reward is due to the fact that in this instance, it’s not necessary to demonstrate a complete technical method to track Tor users – all the participants have to do is evaluate the feasibility of such tracking and propose a theoretical solution.

Since the tender was put out by the Interior Ministry, any results are likely to be used by law enforcement agencies. However, a Tor vulnerability could be worth a lot more than £81,600 to cybercriminals and various intelligence agencies.

Applications are open until 13 August, and successful bidders will have to submit the results of their work by 30 November. Due to the sensitive nature of this assignment, only Russian nationals can participate in the tender.

The same Russian government agency has also announced a tender for creation of software that can secretly access remote PCs, codenamed ‘Chameleon-2’ – essentially state-sponsored spyware – with a reward of 20 million roubles (£333,000).

The secret documents released by Edward Snowden last year detailed repeated efforts by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to crack Tor, and similar work has been conducted by the FBI and the UK’s National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU). But despite all the money and resources spent on de-anonymisation efforts, the network is still standing.

Carnegie Mellon researchers Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord were due to reveal how to track Tor users with $3,000 worth of computer equipment, during the annual Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. The talk was cancelled last week, since the researchers did not receive permission to publish the materials developed at the government-funded Software Engineering Institute (SEI).

Tor Project leader Roger Dingledine later said the Tor community had “a handle on what they did, and how to fix it.”

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