Russia open procurement for report on deanonymization of Tor users

Anton Nesterov komachi at openmailbox.org
Sun Jul 27 11:37:35 PDT 2014


Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 02:15:15PM +0000, Anton Nesterov wrote:
>> It's tender by "Special equipment and communication of Ministry of
>> Internal Affairs". Title fully says "Study the possibility of obtaining
>> technical information about users (user equipment) on anonymous network
>> Tor, codename TOR (navy)"
>>
>> ~$111500 (3 900 000 roubles)
>>
>> http://zakupki.gov.ru/epz/order/notice/zkk44/view/common-info.html?regNumber=0373100088714000008
> 
> Here's some press about it.
> 
> http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/russia-announces-111000-bounty-identify-tor-users/?utm_source=o1&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=o1#!bnX9eL
> 
> I find two things particularly amusing.
> 
> 1) that russian companies and citizens would have to pay an entry fee
It's normal, almost all Russian procurements are like this. Also, it can
be only companies that have licenses for access to classified
information and for producing wiretapping devices, I'm not sure it can
be citizens. Probably it will be some companies like MFI Soft or Norsi
Trans who already produce devices Russian mass-surveillance program SORM.

There is something more about that companies
https://www.privacyinternational.org/blog/lawful-interception-the-russian-approach

> 2) CMU dropped their blackhat presenation
> https://www.blackhat.com/latestintel/07212014-a-schedule-update.html
> 
> How likely is it the NSA decided to embargoed CMU's presentation so they
> could keep the data flowing out of Russia via Tor, or does CMU just have
> a russian company they are going to 'license' this too?
Not very likely. I don't think break Tor costs just $111,500. It seems
more like report on existing weaknesses.

Also, Russian journalists found some more interesting procurements
published same day by same agency, including tender for trojan (
http://zakupki.gov.ru/epz/order/notice/zkk44/view/common-info.html?regNumber=0373100088714000017
).





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