Silk Road forums

Saving someone's life is a requirement?

Why else would you be called a hero?

500 posts and you have to save someone from dying of a drug overdose. Then you get hero status.

Wait, what drug user does not already have this movie as well as the movie "Waking Life" already downloaded or purchased?

And Requiem for a Dream!

I agree with the poster above that an easy way around this would be to find a DVD copy for a couple bucks and pay in cash. Problem solved.

It is easy to outlaw gold, but bitcoins are not to stop. Tails leaves no traces and a sd-card is small. You can make a law against the bitcoin, but you can not maintain that law.

They can't completely stop the use of bitcoin, just as a century of drug laws hasn't stopped the use of drugs, but they can make bitcoins difficult to obtain. You would have to buy them surreptitiously and risk going to jail, just like with drugs. That would put a lot of people off from using bitcoins.

Weird, I was reading that page the other day and had the same thought.  If there are gazillons of dollars being made by hidden service providers (SR, etc), it's odd that nobody's funding one of their key ingredients.   Either they don't view it as a significant risk or they can't fund it in a clandestine enough manner.

I suspect it's the latter. The FBI would very interested in someone who gave the Tor Project $100,000 to fund improvement of the hidden service protocol. They have anonymous sponsors, but only in the sense that they are not publicly known. The IRS certainly knows who they are, and the FBI could if they wanted to find out.

You can build your own defenses, of course. At the network layer, you could use persistent entry guards by way of private bridges. Even better would be layered entry guards, or layers of proxies before you get to your entry guards. You could even calculate the descriptor IDs in advance and run relays on anonymous VPSes with identity keys whose hashes closely match the descriptor IDs, so you would always be publishing your hidden service descriptor to service directories that are under your control.

At the application layer, you can harden your software and isolate it in VMs. I'm learning a lot about Xen at the moment, and I plan on experimenting with VM isolated LEMP stacks.

Like a lot of the LE attacks that we theorize about, this one is possible but expensive.

If localbitcoin transactions become more popular, I think we will see stings, especially on people who violate financial regulations, like the FinCEN limit of selling $1000 of BTC a day without a license. Some of those investigations could include drug dealing with BTC.

Thought about this some more.  Assuming you're talking about identifying users accessing hidden services, the key is the attackers' ability to successfully deanonymize the hidden service.   They have to be able to monitor the traffic going to the hidden service to correlate it with monitored user guard node traffic.

And if they can deanonymize the hidden service (AND intercept traffic directly to it for correlation) they'd just be choosing not to bring it down in order to perform traffic analysis.  Or they'd perform that analysis while they were waiting to bring it down.   I think I'm finally understanding your theory about the FH attack.

It's a fairly difficult scenario, though.  They'd need to be able to monitor the traffic to the hidden service, but not be able to bring it down.

Most of the attacks on the Tor network that I've heard about involve surveillance at the edges. You have to run one of your target's entry nodes, and then you can pursue several different attacks.

There are more complex attacks, like brute forcing a relay identity key so it is close to the descriptor ID, so you can become a service directory for the hidden service. That's what Donncha did and it allowed him to count the number of descriptor fetches for Silk Road and other hidden services. That's how we know that Silk Road is about 100 times more popular than Atlantis, because it got 100 times as many descriptor fetches in the 24 hours that Donncha counted them.

If you run the service directory, you still need to become an entry node for your targets. Tor clients keep entry nodes for a month and semi-randomly select new ones. That's why most of these attacks are statistical in nature. They depend on randomly being selected by the target. They are expensive and time consuming if you have a specific target in mind, like a hidden service, but if your target is "all Silk Road users", it's easy to pwn a small random sample of them, because out of tens of thousands of people, some of them will choose your entry guard very quickly.

The payoff from a LE perspective would depend on the target.   For something like SR, I'm not sure they get any value from long-term traffic analysis if they have the option to just bring it down and calling a press conference

I don't think LE would be satisfied with simply bringing the site down. For one, DPR almost certainly has backups and could redeploy the site elsewhere within hours. They would want first to identity DPR and other admins, and second to identify top vendors. That seemed to be their MO in the FH attack -- to identify as many people visiting CP sites as possible, but more importantly to identify the admins of those sites and perhaps accounts that posted a lot of content (ie, major CP distributors).

Long-term, the solution is better hidden service anonymization (which is difficult). 

Yes, definitely. The Tor developers had said that hidden services are experimental. They are a proof of concept. Nobody is getting paid right now to improve the hidden service protocol and make it robust against attacks. The Tor developers work on things that people pay them to work on. They have sponsors who give them specific deliverables. Mostly they are getting paid to work on things that help people in censored countries. That's why they push for more bridges and they've create the obfsproxy protocol. We need to pool money or find someone with deep pockets to anonymously sponsor hidden service development.