Is Tor still safe to use?

From the limited information The Tor Project has, we believe that one user of the long-retired application Ricochet was fully de-anonymized through a guard discovery attack. This was possible, at the time, because the user was using a version of the software that neither had Vanguards-lite, nor the vanguards addon, which were introduced to protect users from this type of attack. This protection exists in Ricochet-Refresh, a maintained fork of the long-retired project Ricochet, since version 3.0.12 released in June of 2022.

In contrast to the CCC, Chaos Computer Club, who was provided access to the documents related to the case and was able to analyze and validate the reporter's assumptions, we were only provided a vague outline and asked broad clarifying questions that left us with uncertainty of the facts, and questions of our own. While we appreciate the journalist contacting us, this same access was not given to the Tor Project.\
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Given the potential risk to our users, we decided to go public. We requested that anyone with additional information about the case share it with us. This would allow us to conduct our own analysis and determine the best course of action to protect our users.\
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To be clear, The Tor Project did not intend to ask for the sources of the story, but sought to understand what evidence existed for a de-anonymization attack to accurately respond to the investigating reporter's questions and assess our disclosure responsibilities. And we continue to have an interest in obtaining more information about how Onion Services users were de-anonymized. If we had access to the same documents as CCC, it would be possible to produce a report with more clarity regarding the actual state of the Tor network and how it affects the great majority of its users.\
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We need more details about this case. In the absence of facts, it is hard for us to issue any official guidance or responsible disclosures to the Tor community, relay operators, and users.

Is Tor still safe to use? | Tor Project

This blog post is a response to an investigative news report about a large-scale law-enforcement attack that managed to de-anonymize a user of an old version of the long-retired app Ricochet.

^{blog.torproject.org}

Steinpilz