[tor-talk] Russia actually kind of cracked (?) Tor

[Anton Nesterov]

On 11 July 2014 Russia's Interior Ministry posted a contract seeking a
group "to study the possibility of obtaining technical information on
users and users' equipment of Tor anonymous network" for $59,000. When
media reports appeared, mentioning of Tor was deleted.

Then company who won this contract (The Central Research Institute of
Economics, Informatics, and Control Systems, subsidiary of Rostec) then
posted a contract to hire a law firm tasked with negotiating a way out
of the deal
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-22/russia-s-plan-to-crack-tor-crumbles

Now source of Kommersant close to the one of two parties of the deal
says that project was nearly finished, but CRI EICS didn't meet the
deadline, so that why there is court involved. Results was passed to the
Interior Ministry where it's already in use.

Representative of hired law firm told Kommersant that Interior Ministry
wants to just knock down the price or force CRI EICS to pay the forfeit.

Kommersant piece also mention a case when one user was deanonymized when
he used Tor Browser to post trip reports and prosecuted for propaganda
of illegal substances (I don't believe that was result of "cracking
Tor", he probably failed somehow (maybe used real name), also it would
be strange to perform probably costly attack for fine less than $100).

http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2861002 Kommersant report (in Russian)

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