Its official, Carnegie Mellon University helped FBI break Tor protection because of a subpoena
It’s now proved that that Tor admin’s accusations that FBI took the help of Carnegie Mellon University to break Tor anonymity network. In a statement posted on its site yesterday, Carnegie Mellon University said that it’s Software Engineering Institute helped FBI to break Tor due to a subpoena.
Though the statement no where accepts that the CMU or its Software Engineering Institute helped FBI to break Tor anonymity network directly, the last para of the statement implies that the University helped FBI in breaking Tor due to a subpoena.
“In the course of its work, the university from time to time is served with subpoenas requesting information about research it has performed. The university abides by the rule of law, complies with lawfully issued subpoenas and receives no funding for its compliance.”
However the University trashed the media reports that publicised Tor Project Director Roger Dingledine’s claims that the researchers were paid breaking Tor. The statement says that this claim is “inaccurate.”
“Carnegie Mellon University includes the Software Engineering Institute, which is a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) established specifically to focus on software-related security and engineering issues. One of the missions of the SEI’s CERT division is to research and identify vulnerabilities in software and computing networks so that they may be corrected,” they explained.
The carefully crafted statement didn’t exactly say that in this case they were served in a subpoena, and didn’t explicitly say they performed the attack that resulted in the discovery of a number of suspected criminals.
The same statement has been issued by the Software Engineering Institute. For those who don’t know, SEI is a not-for-profit center specifically established by the US Department of Defense to focus on addressing its software and cybersecurity needs.
