It’s worth noting that a sizeable number of Tor exit nodes are actually run by the German government. Meaning: they know exactly what’s going through those nodes.

So all they need to do to unmask a Tor source IP is control the first hop too. They’re in a position where they can narrow searches down to activity they’re actually interested in without significantly decreasing the privacy of other Tor users, and then they can peel back the onion.

This has been the case since shortly after Tor was created.

In contrast to the CCC, Chaos Computer Club, who was provided access to the documents related to the case and was able to analyze and validate the reporter’s assumptions, we were only provided a vague outline and asked broad clarifying questions that left us with uncertainty of the facts, and questions of our own.

What the fuck

Bad post.

A: old news

B: missing important context

C: Most likely partially fabricated by law enforcement according to many experts and the tor project. They didnt execute a full timing attack because they are not capable of doing that.

From the limited information The Tor Project has, we believe that one user of the long-retired application Ricochet was fully de-anonymized through a guard discovery attack. This was possible, at the time, because the user was using a version of the software that neither had Vanguards-lite, nor the vanguards addon, which were introduced to protect users from this type of attack. This protection exists in Ricochet-Refresh, a maintained fork of the long-retired project Ricochet, since version 3.0.12 released in June of 2022.

Bundeskriminalamt

https://www.bka.de/EN/OurTasks/AreasOfCrime/Cybercrime/cybercrime_node.html

Government (Lodge & Station): their tots, you can’t have!

Thanks for linking the HN thread 👍