14 DAY TRIAL // A US district court judge has confirmed what everyone already knew, that the US government, through the Department of Defense (DOD), has forced the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to conduct a study on methods of deanonymizing Tor traffic, Vice reports.
According to court documents in the case of Brian Farrell, one of the people arrested in the Silk Road raid, the US Department of Defense hired CMU to conduct research on the TOR network and methods of uncloaking its users.
DOD paid CMU for researcher used by the FBI
The research never saw the light of day because the FBI subpoenaed CMU and then used the research to track down the Silk Road Tor-based website, a marketplace for drugs, firearms, and various other shady services.
This happened in early 2014, and rumors of what happened started surfacing after CMU researchers signed up for the Black Hat 2014 security conference to present their results, only to cancel without an explanation a few days before the event.
Their research theme reached the ears of the people behind the Tor network, who plugged their privacy holes, and made public allegations against CMU and the FBI in November 2015.
The Tor Project accused the FBI (and indirectly the US DOD) of paying CMU around $1 million (€0.9 million) to deanonymize Tor traffic.
Nobody believed CMU when it told the truth in November
The University's leadership told the press exactly what happened, but nobody believed it until now, when the documents revealed in the Brian Farrel case showed that they told the truth.
In the meantime, the Tor Project started a fundraising campaign to secure its financial independence from the US government, and later announced a bug bounty program to ensure that trusted security researchers will be working hard and in secrecy to fix Tor's vulnerabilities.
The bug bounty will debut this summer, and security researchers will have access to the program based only on an invitation extended to them by Tor's staff.