Last night, German authorities raided seven data centers in search of child pornography trafficking or evidence thereof, seizing a total of ten servers in the process. This would be a routine incident in the worldwide battle against underage porn distribution, if not for the fact that some of these machines were running TOR anonymyzing proxy servers, and nothing else.
TOR is an “onion routing” system, where a directory server points your traffic to a middleman node that can pass it on to other middlemen or to an exit node. The exit node finally connects to the site you’re trying to reach, and the data is sent back through the system of middleman tunnels. Every step of the way is encrypted, except for the final exit node to the content server connection. Some sources say that several German middleman TOR servers have been confiscated over the past few days, leading up to the recent exit-node seizures. If that’s the case, it makes the raid seem like an attempt to take out TOR infrastructure.
That’s not easy to do, however. At the moment, only 20 of 787 TOR exit nodes appear to be offline or hibernating, with 5 of the unreachable nodes inside German IP address space. If the government had hopes of shutting down at least the German part of the anonymizing network, there’s still some work to do: 180 German exit nodes remain in operation.
It’s more likely that the police are after log files from the TOR servers, and may have simply gone for exit nodes after the middleman servers proved unfruitful to the cause. However, TOR’s default settings don’t leave any logs usable for tracking down any individual user’s actual site usage—two separate settings have to be changed in order to generate logs with that level of detail.
Related Posts
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- U.S. Charges 27 in Online Child Porn Sting
- Internet providers to combat child porn
- German Tor Network Just Fine, Tor Director Says
- Utah Attorney General Files 1st P2P Child Porn Case (press release)
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TOR ftw