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Published at LXer: Carnegie Mellon University this week denied reports it was paid by the FBI to help identify criminal suspects on the Dark Web. Read More......

The university now implies it may have been subpoenaed to give up its anonymity-stripping technique. The post Carnegie Mellon Denies FBI Paid for Tor-Breaking Research appeared first on WIRED.

First, let's go back a year or so. A few weeks before the big Black Hat Conference in 2014, it was announced that a planned presentation from two Carnegie Mellon University researchers (Michael McCord and Alexander Volynkin), entitled "You Don't Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget" was pulled from the program, leading to lots and lots of speculation about what happened. Soon after this, the Tor Project announced it had discovered a group of relays that appeared to trying to deanonymize Tor users who were operating Tor hidden services.

Feds may have obtained Tor IP addresses with no warrant during Silk Road 2 case.

Wow. @CarnegieMellon is America's Shanghai Jiaotong. https://t.co/UAtaAgJvJh— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 11, 2015Documents published by Vice News: Motherboard and further reporting by Wired News suggest that a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University who canceled their scheduled 2015 BlackHat talk identified Tor hidden servers and visitors, and turned that data over to the FBI. No matter who the researchers and which institution, it sounds like a serious ethical breach.First, from VICE, a report which didn't name CMU but revealed that a U.S. University helped the FBI bust Silk Road 2, and suspects in child pornography cases:An academic institution has been providing information to the FBI that led to the identification of criminal suspects on the dark web, according to court documents reviewed by Motherboard. Those suspects include a staff member of the now-defunct Silk Road 2.0 drug marketplace, and a man charged with possession of child pornography.It raises questions about the role that academics are playing in the continued crackdown on dark web crime, as well as the fairness of the trials of each suspect, as crucial discovery evidence has allegedly been withheld from both defendants.Here's a screenshot of the relevant portion of one of the court Documents that Motherboard/Vice News published:Later today, a followup from Wired about discussion that points the finger directly at CMU:The Tor Project on Wednesday afternoon sent WIRED a statement from its director Roger Dingledine directly accusing Carnegie Mellon of providing its Tor-breaking research in secret to the FBI in exchange for a payment of “at least $1 million.” And while Carnegie Mellon’s attack had been rumored to have been used in takedowns of dark web drug markets that used Tor’s “hidden service” features to obscure their servers and administrators, Dingledine writes that the researchers’ dragnet was larger, affecting innocent users, too.No official word yet from the FBI on any of this.[caption id="attachment_433904" align="alignnone" width="800"] shutterstock[/caption]Here's the Tor Project's statement in full this afternoon:The Tor Project has learned more about last year's attack by Carnegie Mellon researchers on the hidden service subsystem. Apparently these researchers were paid by the FBI to attack hidden services users in a broad sweep, and then sift through their data to find people whom they could accuse of crimes. We publicized the attack last year, along with the steps we took to slow down or stop such an attack in the future.Here is the link to their (since withdrawn) submission to the Black Hat conference, along with Ed Felten's analysis at the time.We have been told that the payment to CMU was at least $1 million.There is no indication yet that they had a warrant or any institutional oversight by Carnegie Mellon's Institutional Review Board. We think it's unlikely they could have gotten a valid warrant for CMU's attack as conducted, since it was not narrowly tailored to target criminals or criminal activity, but instead appears to have indiscriminately targeted many users at once.Such action is a violation of our trust and basic guidelines for ethical research. We strongly support independent research on our software and network, but this attack crosses the crucial line between research and endangering innocent users.This attack also sets a troubling precedent: Civil liberties are under attack if law enforcement believes it can circumvent the rules of evidence by outsourcing police work to universities. If academia uses "research" as a stalking horse for privacy invasion, the entire enterprise of security research will fall into disrepute. Legitimate privacy researchers study many online systems, including social networks — If this kind of FBI attack by university proxy is accepted, no one will have meaningful 4th Amendment protections online and everyone is at risk.When we learned of this vulnerability last year, we patched it and published the information we had on our blog.We teach law enforcement agents that they can use Tor to do their investigations ethically, and we support such use of Tor — but the mere veneer of a law enforcement investigation cannot justify wholesale invasion of people's privacy, and certainly cannot give it the color of "legitimate research".Whatever academic security research should be in the 21st century, it certainly does not include "experiments" for pay that indiscriminately endanger strangers without their knowledge or consent.Remember when researchers abruptly cancelled a talk at Def Con on de-anonymizing Tor users? This might explain it. https://t.co/ofTSi5LDPq— Lorenzo Franceschi-B (@lorenzoFB) November 11, 2015The likely absence of IRB approval of CMU Tor research is even more problematic now that it looks like they turned user data over to the FBI— Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) November 11, 2015Journalists following up on CMU/FBI story: Call the CMU General Counsel. Ask if Tor team got IRB approval for research. If not, why not.— Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) November 11, 2015

The Tor Project's director accuses Carnegie Mellon of providing its Tor-breaking research in secret to the FBI in exchange for a payment of "at least $1 million." The post Tor Says Feds Paid Carnegie Mellon $1M to Help Unmask Users appeared first on WIRED.