Privacy Flaw Found in Tor Project !
Dec 31, 2011
At the Chaos Computer Club Congress here Tuesday, researchers from the University of Regensburg delivered a new warning about the Tor anonymizer network , a system aimed at hiding details of a computer user's online activity from spying eyes. The attack doesn't quite make a surfer's activity an open book, but offers the ability for someone on the same local network — a Wi-Fi network provider, or an ISP working at law-enforcement (or a regime's) request, for example — to gain a potentially good idea of sites an anonymous surfer is viewing. "Developers have to be aware of this kind of attack, and develop countermeasures," said Dominik Herrmann, a Regensburg Ph.D student studying profiling and fingerprinting attacks. "But that proves to be very difficult." The research, performed by a variety of collaborators in Germany working on anonymity measures, represents a warning for privacy-conscious users wary of spying eyes, whether behind net-unfriendly borders or simply corpo...