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Is Tor still safe to use?

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. This blog post aims to provide insight into what we know so far. Nothing that the Tor Project has learned about this incident suggests that Tor Browser was attacked or exploited. Tor users can continue to use Tor Browser to access the web securely and anonymously.

We are writing this blog post in response to an investigative news story looking into the de-anonymization of an Onion Service used by a Tor user using an old version of the long-retired application Ricochet by way of a targeted law-enforcement attack. Vanguards-lite, released in Tor 0.4.7, protects against the possibility of combining an adversary-induced circuit creation with circuit-based covert channel to obtain a malicious middle relay confirmed to be next to the user's Guard. 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.

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