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<\/p>\nSay it ain’t so!<\/p>\n
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EVER SINCE A <\/span>Carnegie Mellon talk on cracking the anonymity software Tor was abruptly pulled from the schedule of the Black Hat hacker conference last year<\/a>, the security community has been left to wonder whether the research was silently handed over to law enforcement agencies seeking to uncloak the internet\u2019s anonymous users. Now the non-profit Tor Project itself says that it believes the FBI did use Carnegie Mellon\u2019s attack technique\u2014and paid them handsomely for the privilege.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cat least $1 million.\u201d You can now read the full statement on the Tor Project\u2019s blog<\/a>.1<\/sup> And while Carnegie Mellon\u2019s attack had been rumored to have been used in takedowns of dark web drug markets that used Tor\u2019s \u201chidden service\u201d features to obscure their servers and administrators, Dingledine writes that the researchers\u2019 dragnet was larger, affecting innocent users, too.<\/p>\n \u201cApparently 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,\u201d Dingledine writes. \u201cSuch 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.\u201d<\/p>\n