The developers of the Tor project have published Wednesday on the official blog of the project a post accusing the FBI of paying $ 1 million to theCarnegie Mellon University to take advantage of their work to attack the Tor network and get the real IP address of servers and network users.
The case began in 2014 when Carnegie Mellon University's presentation was canceled at the last moment during the Balck Hat conference. The university was planning to explain how to break Tor's anonymity.
This is why on Wednesday, the director of Tor, Roger Dingledine, accused the university of having cashed its findings with the FBI for the sum of $ 1 million.
The main objective of the FBI has been to identify the real IP addresses and then to locate the main administrators of the SilK Road 2.0 portal, a marketplace " darknet »Marketing all kinds of banned products, foremost drugs. The investigation resulted in the arrest last January of Brian Richard Farrell identified as the main admin of the site. Many analysts wondered how the federal investigative agency had seen the members of this platform identified so quickly: we now have the answer.
It is clear that governments do not like the idea of a world where it is possible to chat or exchange files completely anonymously, as the Tor project proposes. However, for the Tor team, this is an attack that goes "against civil liberties", considering that the FBI is unlikely to have obtained a warrant to do so. .
However, if this maneuver was confirmed, it would not be the first of its kind. In July 2014, Russia announced that it would offer nearly 4 million rubles - 85.000 euros - to anyone capable of decrypting data sent through the Tor network.