Has anyone had the identity revealed in Tor?

[Jon McLachlan]

It is trivial for global passive adversaries, like the government or 
large telcom companies, to link true sources and true destinations of 
Tor traffic.

Tor aims to provide anonymity against weaker, local adversaries - and 
even then, adversaries can win, as investigated in these papers.

Read,
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/oakland05torta.pdf
http://cypherspace.org/adam/pubs/traffic.pdf
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~hopper/ccs-latency-leak.pdf
http://petworkshop.org/2007/papers/PET2007_preproc_Sampled_traffic.pdf

Or, for a lot of papers on anonymity,
http://freehaven.net/anonbib/date.html


I would bet it happens more often than we'd like to think, as practical 
low-cost anonymity is still an open problem.


~Jon

Drake Wilson wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 27, 2007 at 01:37:55PM -0700, Rouslan Nabioullin wrote:
>   
>> Just curious, up to date has anyone been caught while using Tor?
>>     
>
> That's a very vague question.
>
> Suppose I'm using Tor to hide my current IP address, since I don't want
> people to know that I'm actually posting something from a secret hideout
> in Paraguay.  I still post my full name and telephone number, so
> everyone knows that I made the post, and they can find out where I usually
> live by using reverse lookup on the number, but my rivals at Foocorp never
> manage to associate me with the hideout.  Have I been "caught"?
>
> You can attach arbitrarily complicated semantics to the idea of
> "identity" and what it means to have been "revealed" in this context,
> so you'll need to be much clearer than that to get any reasonable answer
> out.  Even then, I doubt the data are easy to get reliably, unless perhaps
> there's been a case of someone being tracked down while using Tor that was
> reported in major broadcast media.  If the NSA were keeping tabs on Tor
> users somehow, it'd be very hard to find out.
>
>    ---> Drake Wilson
>