Tor relay of a Brazilian University was banned after harvesting .onions
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The Tor relay of a Brazilian University was banned by the Tor administrators because it was spotted collecting the .onion addresses of visitors.
A team of researchers from a Brazilian University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil, has had its Tor relay node banned because it was spotted collecting the .onion addresses of visitors.
Marcus Rodrigues, a junior researcher with the Brazilian University, explained he and his colleagues were working to develop a tool that could identify malicious hidden services.
According to the Tor administrators, the activity conducted by the researchers is a violation of the Tor Project’s ethical guidelines and triggered the banning of the node.
Below the description published by the researchers in a Tor mailing list post:
They decided to collect .onion addresses and fetch their content to classify the hidden service.
“My research in particular is about malicious hidden services. I’m developing a method to automatically categorize a malicious hidden service by its content (eg, drug traffic website, malware propagation),” Rodrigues told The Register.
“We would then publish an academic paper containing up-to-date statistics regarding what kind of malicious websites there are on the dark web. We were also going to develop a platform on which the user could verify if a certain .onion website is trustworthy or malicious before entering it.”
The team set up a Tor relay to collect specific data about the hidden services. Rodrigues clarified that data collected could not be used to unmask TOR users or locate a specific server running the hidden service.
“That would provide information about the Hidden Services running at the time, such as their .onion addresses, their popularity and some technical data – none of which would allow me to deanonymize or harm the hidden service in any way,” he explained.
Rodrigues was unable to restore its Tor relay online, he explained that the research will go on in any case, with different techniques.
“I can use other methods to discover the Hidden Services,” he explains, “but none is as informative or as efficient.”
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(Security Affairs – Tor, data harvesting)
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