Silk Road forums

There are lots of things you don't want to do or that are useless to do over Tor.

Useless: logging into Facebook, email, or any service already linked to your real identity.

Difficult: most banks/financial services will lock your account if you come from a Tor exit node. Some web sites block Tor exit nodes.

Dangerous: Logging into a service that doesn't use SSL exposes you to the possibility of the exit node operator sniffing your traffic and stealing your credentials.

There are lots of things you can do over Tor, like general browsing and reading. This makes you safer in the event that your internet connection is being watched, because it's harder to correlate whatever you're doing on the other end. Your SR activity is lost in the noise of all the general browsing.

However, as pointed out, there are lots of things you don't want to do over Tor.

You can verify the signature. The Tor packages are signed by a Tor developer named Erinn Clark.

Of course, it's possible that somebody put a gun to her head and forced her to sign compromised packages. In that case, download the source from the Tor Project's Git repository, audit it to make sure it is secure, and compile it yourself. That's paranoia level 9000, but I'm sure there are people who do that.

Yes, it would. 512 bit keys can already be cracked, which is why it's mind-boggling stupid that some PGP programs use that as a default key size. 1024 bit keys will probably be cracked in the next 5 years, so those aren't safe anymore either. That's why we recommend at least a 2048 bit key, but 4096 bit is better because it buys you even more time.

So why don't we just use one million bit keys? Because it's computationally expensive to use them and that increases non-linearly with key size. Nobody wants to wait a few hours (or days or weeks) to encrypt a message. So there's a trade off: the level of security that we accept as convenient but still safe is usually something that can be broken in 20 years (instead of a million years), and we increase our security (in this case, key size) over time.

At the time, I was considering TorBOX as an option for hosting a secure hidden service. You can run headless instances of VirtualBox on a server, just remove all the GUI components on the workstation. Ultimately I decided two physical machines was safer and actually less complicated to setup.

He's a short discussion about securing hidden services:

http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=100998.msg705761#msg705761

Another disadvantage is the performance hit you get running in a VM, and in this case, running 2 VMS, even if the Linux distro is more lightweight. Last time I tried Whonix, when it was called TorBOX, it was using Fluxbox or Openbox as the DE, but the screenshots on the web site show KDE now. Is it using KDE now? Because that's the most bloated desktop environment. I'm wondering why they would switch to that for a VM.

Other than that, everything you said is spot on.

The Cleaned Hidden Wiki is a good place to start.

http://3suaolltfj2xjksb.onion/hiddenwiki/index.php/Main_Page

@Driver613

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