Didn't the feds take down Silk Road because the owner paid a cop posing as a hitman to kill someone?
Also, there is a problem where hidden services can be enumerated by scanning IPs. With IPv4, it is practical for a well connected entity to scan the entire internet and search for hidden services, making it possible to match to IPs. This is only an issue for people running hidden services, not Tor users.
Hidden services can't be located in that manner unless the owner has badly misconfigured the service so it's reachable by IP address. A typical configuration would have the service listening on 127.0.0.1 or a private (RFC 1918) network address only, and have Tor connect to that.
I specifically addressed this in the article. The feds located freedom hosting by using an exploit in Firefox which was able to deanonymize users. I don't know enough about the silk road case, but it seems probable that traffic correlation was used in that case.
I agree that things can change in a year, but the essential point that Tor is not cryptographically broken is still true, IMO.
>The feds located freedom hosting by using an exploit in Firefox
That doesn't even make sense. Firefox is client software. How would I locate a hidden service, a server, via an exploit in Firefox? Servers don't generate websites with Firefox.
Re:Things You Should Know About Tor
by hendersoon on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @09:24AM
(#7976782)
Tor is not cryptographically broken, I agree. But see my post above about the number of nodes-- it is trivial for any nation-state to spend a small bit of money to completely compromise Tor.
How did the feds take down silk road?
The "tor stinks" slide was over a year old when these events occurred. A lot can change in a year.