Earlier this year, the University of Luxembourg’s Alex Biryukov, Ivan Pustogarov, and Ralf-Phillip Weinmann discovered a flaw in the Tor Network permitting anyone looking to track the network’s users and content. Often championed for its efforts on behalf of free speech and privacy, this flaw clearly presented a significant contradiction to the network’s purpose.
MIT Technology Review reports that, before alerting the Tor Network to the problem—which was promptly fixed once reported—Biryukov, Pustogarov, and Weinmann took the opportunity to track the traffic, see where it originated, and what it contained.
The colleagues uncovered an unsettling truth. The network is dominated by botent traffic, and the remaining content and users include pornographic and black market material.
Of the top twenty most popular Tor addresses, eleven are command and control centres for botnets, including all of the top five. Of the rest, five carry adult content, one is for Bitcoin mining and one is the Silk Road marketplace. Two could not be classified.
As MIT Technology Review concludes: “That’s a depressing picture but perhaps it’s the price humanity has to pay for freedom of speech.”
Here, too, is a report by Biryukov, Pustogarov, and Weinmann about the security flaw.
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