Russian Tor network-wrecking effort takes bizarre turn The Russian government's plan to unmask citizens who use the anonymizing network Tor has hit a snag: the company hired to do the job is trying to wriggle out of its contract. In July 2014, the Russian Interior Ministry advertised for a firm to "study the possibility of obtaining technical information about users (user …
I can guess that the company doesn't want the contract and regrets taking it. Perhaps Tor is not as easy a target as was assumed. This case is probably going to be an expensive one as it is dealing with the breaking of a government contract. As far as lawyers fees are concerned, is $150K a lot?
In two different articles, El Reg has told us that the contract was for a study into the possibility of cracking ToR (for certain values of cracking). Seems easy to fulfill *that* contract: "We studied it, and don't see any possibility. Please remit 3.9m roubles by return". Of course, if somebody signed up without reading the contract and has found that they're now on the hook for actually supplying a crack, then it will be worth employing m'learned friends to wriggle out. Good luck with that.
Caveat: I have not read the original tender, in Russian or in translation.
<tinfoil>
Or...
Its been cracked (either by them or someone else), but theyve just realised, now that its cracked they're quite happy for crims to keep using it.
If they award for successfully completing the contract then everyone knows its cracked.
If they make a big media story out of it being 'impossible' then the crims keep using it, while they keep listening in
</tinfoil>
Yes, indeed. This has been suggested elsewhere more than once.
£38,700 would cheap beyond the levels of ludicrousness by American standards- a year's salary for a *single* run-of-the-mill programmer?- and even allowing for Russians' income generally being far lower, along with the fact that the Russian government doesn't have anything like the same silly levels of money to throw at "security" projects like this, it's still low beyond credibility.
It wouldn't take an overly rabid conspiracist to think that the company had actually got paid a lot more, succeeded to some extent and are putting up this charade to conceal the fact.
"The US government and others have spent much more than that building and sponsoring the Tor network, and plenty of intelligence agencies would pay a lot more for access to the data running over the anonymized network."
Wasn't it that one of the big Tor nodes resolves to an IP address in Langley, Virginia?
You'd think a total control freak like Russia would've simply gone "nuclear" and banned any and all use of encryption that can't be unlocked by state-sponsored keys, with stiff gulag time for anyone caught using it. Then they would go after the stego by mandating that any and all audio-visual material be mangled and processed and all test forced to adhere to a strict format and automatic spelling corrector to remove stego in text by odd spacing or spelling errors.
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