Officially the Kremlin is sustaining similar projects “in order to ensure the country’s defense and security”. The tender, titled “Perform research, code ‘TOR’ (Navy),” was posted on July 11th on the official procurement website.įigure – Competition promoted by the Ministry of the Interior of the Russian Federation (MVD) The authorities are offering nearly 4 million rubles, approximately $111,000, for the development of technology to decrypt data sent over Tor and identify Tor users.
The Russian government has issued a tender to recruit companies and organizations which are interested in developing the technology to track users and their activities within the Tor network.
The Ministry of the Interior of the Russian Federation (MVD) has recently started an initiative to “study the possibility of obtaining technical information about users (user equipment) of Tor anonymous network”. Also the Russian government is actively working to try to crack Tor encryption to de-anonymize its users. Edward Snowden revealed months ago that the US intelligence is worried by possible misuses of the Tor network and was investing to compromise it. Intelligence agencies declared war on the anonymizing network.
Governments sustain that technologies like Tor are abused by cybercrime and terrorists and are a potential source of threats, but organizations for the defense of online privacy and freedom of expression sustain that intelligence agencies are trying to extend their monitoring capabilities over anonymizing networks. Tor networks and other anonymizing networks represent an obstacle to Internet monitoring. Governments are spending great effort to improve monitoring capabilities. In this post is an overview of the recent events regarding Tor and the attacks on its infrastructures, with explicit reference to principal initiatives conducted by governments to de-anonymize Tor users. According to Tor Metrics, the number of people worldwide who directly access the anonymizing network is 2.5 million.įigure – Users directly connected to Tor network The Tor network is widely used by digital activists and individuals in many critical regions to avoid the Internet censorship operated by governments in China, Syria, Bahrain and Iran. Practically every government is trying to infiltrate the network to de-anonymize its users. Law enforcement and Intelligence agencies all over the world are spending a considerable effort to try to break the encryption used with Tor.
Tor traffic is encrypted multiple times passing through different nodes of the network, also known as Tor relays. The encryption processes implemented in the Tor Network allow it to protect users’ privacy.
0 kommentar(er)
