Unless I'm missing some info, I don't see anything that points at them finding all this info through Tor or the server. They identified the user AND 'also found what specific pages Al-Azhari visited'. That could've happened from his PC after they arrested him. Language like this is always ambiguous in order to give out as little information as possible while still providing some.
Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User
by Scoundreller on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @09:06AM
(#34412475)
> That could've happened from his PC after they arrested him.
Tor client wouldn’t save any of that.
Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User
by thefreeman on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @09:13AM
(#34412560)
he may not have been using the tor browser
> Based on what little I know of SSL, this suggests the server was compromised too?
Not necessarily.
If a passive snooper knows I used Tor Browser to make an SSL request to en.wikipedia.org and received 987,654 bytes then immediately made a SSL request to upload.wikimedia.org and received 1,234,567 bytes that might be enough information to work out I visited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency.
That size-inference side channel leak has been patched for years, random padding is added between hops to mitigate this.
It is large files / DDoS going over the network that is still hard to obfuscate.
Which is why TOR is intentionally slow, especially when requesting larger files. If it wasn't, you could watch the lump of data traverse across the pipe.
source: n/a
Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User
by HackerNCoder on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @02:00PM
(#34417028)
source: padding spec, https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/padding-spec....
Thank you. My brain is very damp but knew it was somewhere.
Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User
by Scoundreller on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @09:52AM
(#34413043)
BRB, padding all of my webpages to be exactly 650mb each.
Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User
by UI_at_80x24 on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @10:53AM
(#34413998)
That way to can copy it to CD too!
Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User
by kylehotchkiss on Wednesday January 18, 2023 @01:11AM
(#34423904)
npm install electron react-native-web
Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User
by Run_DOS_Run on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @10:57AM
(#34414062)
That's why Tor is communicating mostly over fixed-size cells with a fixed size of 514 bytes (or 512 if tor version < 4).
There is also random padding added to cells, so that the cell content is unpredictable.
Based on what little I know of SSL, this suggests the server was compromised too? Or does tor do a bad job of certificate pinning?
Edit: Or the clients are/were compromised. Or the suspect’s computer was compromised. Or they can somehow decrypt traffic between client and server.