Former National Security Agency contractor Edward released another document revealing that the security agency has been trying to use Firefox flaw to track Tor anonymity users.
Tor, which is bundled as a service with Firefox browsers, is known for its anonymizing offering to allow online users to proceed with their activities under the complex network protecting their locations.
NSA is doing everything it can to crack the codes and gain access to Tor's growing number of users. "Throughout history, nations have used various methods to protect their secrets, and today terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers and others use technology to hide their activities. Our intelligence community would not be doing its job if we did not try to counter that," the security agency said to the Register.
Snowden's PowerPoint presentation titled Tor stinks, showed just how powerful the Tor anonymizing system is. It described how the efforts of both the U.S. security agency along with the U.K's GCHQ (Govt Communications Headquarters) were blocked off from any access to or track Tor's users.
"We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time. With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users, however, no success de-anonymizing a user," said Snowden.
Another Snowden document titled The Guardian revealed that the NSA also initiated action to take advantage of Firefox’s vulnerability to crack Tor’s system. The Egotistical Giraffe, as the Firefox attack was termed, targeted and launched a zero-day attack on the 17th version of the browser. Firefox creator Mozilla already updated its browsers to prevent this occurrence. However, Tor users whose software is not updated on time are still at risk.
The security agency also tried to use Tor nodes but failed due to the growing number of nodes that increase with the user count. This means that tracking would be almost impossible in due time with increasing Tor adoption.
Bruce Schneier, a security expert said that it is extremely difficult to infiltrate the system and that the agencies have not been successful yet in doing so.
"These documents give Tor a huge pat on the back. If I was a Tor developer, I'd be really smiling after reading this stuff," Schneier told the Register.
