On July 6 we had publish for a presentation to be held at the security conference Black Hat to be held in the US this year. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh would present a low-cost method to help uncover it identity of TOR network users. Unfortunately, their presentation was canceled last week.
The decision was sent to the conference organizers by the Legal Adviser of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and Carnegie Mellon University, and states that the details of the presentation have not been approved for publication by the SEI and the University.
The presentation was to be held by Alexander Volynkin, a research scientist of the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) of the University, and was titled: “You Don't Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget. "
"Unfortunately, Mr Volynkin will not be able to speak at the conference as the presentation has not yet been approved by the CMU / SEI for publication."
The reasons behind the event are not clear, but the only thing that is certain is that the request does not come from his team TOR Project.
Roger Dingledine, who heads the TOR project, said that you are working with the CERT team to disclose the details of the vulnerability.
"We did not ask Black Hat or CERT to cancel the presentation. We asked (and continue to ask) the CERT presenter questions about certain aspects of the research, but we had no idea that the presentation would be canceled. " says Dingledine.
Researchers Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord said there was no risk of someone else using their resources to break the Tor network.
They also said the hack required at least $ 3.000 to uncover the identities of "hundreds of thousands of Tor users."
