SurveillanceNSA tried to crack Tor anonymity tool
In its efforts to gather more intelligence, and overcome obstacles to this effort, the National Security Agency (NSA) has repeatedly tried to develop attacks against people using Tor, a software tool designed to protect online anonymity – and which is primarily funded and promoted by the U.S. government itself to help political activists, whistleblowers, militaries, and law enforcement. The NSA’s determined effort to crack Tor raises questions about whether the agency, deliberately or inadvertently, acted against Internet users in the United States when attacking Tor. One of the main functions of Tor is to hide the country of all of its users, meaning any attack could be hitting members of Tor’s large U.S. user base.
In its efforts to gather more intelligence, and overcome obstacles to this effort, the National Security Agency (NSA) has repeatedly tried to develop attacks against people using Tor, a software tool designed to protect online anonymity – and which is primarily funded and promoted by the U.S. government itself to help political activists, whistleblowers, militaries, and law enforcement.
Among the NSA documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, are documents detailing the NSA’s efforts and showing its successes against Tor.
James Ball, Bruce Schneier, and Glenn Greenwald write in the Guardian that one technique the NSA developed and used targeted the Firefox Web browser used with Tor, giving the agency full control over targets’ computers, including access to files, all keystrokes, and all online activity (for a more technical discussion, see Bruce Schneier’s blog post, “How the NSA Attacks Tor/Firefox Users With QUANTUM and FOXACID”).
Ball et al. note, though, that the documents do suggest, however, that the fundamental security of the Tor service has not been breached by the NSA’s efforts.
Tor — acronym for The Onion Router – is an open-source public project which bounces its users’ Internet traffic through several other computers, which it calls “relays” or “nodes,” to keep it anonymous and avoid online censorship tools.
Tor receives about 60 percent of its funding from the U.S. government, mostly from the State Department and Department of Defense, with the goal of having the anonymity tool help dissidents and activists in countries such as China, Iran, and Syria.
The NSA’s documents acknowledge the service is popular in countries where the Internet is routinely surveilled or censored. One NSA presentation notes that among uses of Tor for “general privacy” and “non-attribution,” it can be used for “circumvention of nation state internet policies” — and is used by “dissidents” in “Iran, China, etc.”
Indeed, the governments of both countries have tried to limit Tor’s use: China has tried repeatedly to block Tor entirely, while the main reason behind Iran’s efforts to create a “national Internet” entirely under government control was to prevent circumvention of such controls.
