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It isn't such a small score in absolute terms. ECDH is the clear winner versus RSA, and forward secrecy with ECDH is clearly superior to not having it. You get keys and ciphertexts that are *much* stronger than the equivalent length RSA keys, and with forward secrecy you prevent previous messages from being decrypted if a private key / vendor is compromised. However in a more practical sense, PGP is good enough at higher than 1,024 key sizes and forward secrecy still doesn't protect you if the person you communicate with is compromised or malicious *prior* to you sending them communications (although it does if they are compromised or turn malicious AFTER you have sent them communications)

Forward secrecy key agreement schemes prevent an attacker who finds a private key from decrypting previous messages, both parties need to use a new key pair for each message, usually algorithms like ECDH are used for this. You do one initial key exchange with ECDSA to have a way to authenticate identity, then every other exchange takes place with a freshly generated ECDH key pair / shared secret. After the message is decrypted the signature can be confirmed. Each message uses a brand new set of public and private keys for both participants, so if a vendor is raided and their most recent key is compromised it will not be useful for decrypting the entire history of messages, as they should be securely overwriting their previous private key with each message exchange. OTR does this automatically for instant message communications

No crypto will protect communications contents from the person you send the communications to though. That is entirely outside the scope of cryptography, rather it is human intelligence.

Quote from: kmfkewm on June 03, 2012, 07:18 am

Quote from: klaw239 on June 03, 2012, 05:10 am

Quote from: trr on June 03, 2012, 05:07 am

Quote from: klaw239 on June 03, 2012, 04:55 am

As far as toasting the drives go I was not referring to just deleting partitions and wiping to zeros. Magnetic retrieval is usually  a success  so any drive should be taken apart  flip the  magnet in it out and damage the sob beyond any kind of retrieval.. In a situation said above I would have a detonator attached to all drives  set to explode  remotely before the feds enter the fourth floor and to be done before they enter  also to ensure no feds are injured or killed. Who wants that charge?

One you would be short on time to do that and two how would you control the blast radius , underground ? Real life scenario this is not.

Does not take much of a blast to destroy a hard drive especially if it is concealed in a vault or hidden blast proof compartment   with the ability  for the signal to reach to detonator.

Stupid idea is stupid. First of all physical damage to destroy data on a hard drive is a horrible way to go about things unless you plan to entirely melt it or grind it into dust particles. Why not just encrypt it and cut power? More realistic, and far more effective, and no destruction of evidence charges. Maybe contempt of court if you refuse to give up the password, but that is what deniable encryption is for.

As far as Tor goes of course it can be hacked, just in the past 12 months there have been several remote code execution vulnerabilities in it. Pretty much nothing should be considered hack proof unless it has been formally verified.

That encryption can will be probably hacked .  Within two weeks or so if it commercial . Unless we have cryptographers on site  but that is another factor .

Encryption isn't hacked it is cryptanalyzed. And civilians have access to very strong encryption. Actually,  civilians have access to military grade encryption, but the people on SR are not using truly military grade encryption in the overwhelming majority of cases. RSA is no longer approved for information at the secret or top secret levels, ECDH and ECDSA are. The symmetric encryption algorithms people on SR are using are military grade for up to Top Secret but there is a higher level of classification that uses classified encryption algorithms. Also the mode of operation used for symmetric algorithms is not accepted for secret or top secret information even though the algorithms themselves are. But it really doesn't matter because PGP and Truecrypt are both secure, even if they are not military grade. Two weeks is a laugh and a half.

honestly what is to stop the government from running there own internet hidden tor network inside tor for their "communications" its highly doubtful they would piggyback the same servers for the most sensitive info, they likely have a system more highly developed for operation than SR and if smart get lots of ideas too for onion anon security.

I strongly suspect that the United States Military does *not* use the standard Tor software nor the standard Tor network. I strongly believe that they run their own Tor nodes, and only make them part of the public Tor network to gain a form of cover traffic. After all, if only the military used military Tor nodes, it wouldn't be very anonymous for them. This is the original reasoning given for why they opened Tor up to the public. However, they neglected to mention that if the military and the public use the military Tor nodes, it will still be anonymous for the military, even if military traffic is processed differently, provided they can avoid leaving any visible fingerprints that could differentiate between the two types of traffic. It is likely that any hidden services they host are behind dozens of Tor nodes that they own themselves. However, their nodes would still be listed on the public Tor network, and would still route traffic for others. Military traffic to these hidden services is also probably processed differently than the rest of the traffic going through their nodes. It is also probably very well camouflaged to make it very difficult if not impossible to distinguish from normal Tor traffic. I don't see the government risking China owning their entry and exit nodes. I also have other reasons to believe that this is true. It is entirely possible that I am just being paranoid though, although I also am certainly not the only person who suspects this to be the case.

An interesting idea that someone else shared with me, is the possibility of using Tor as a covert channel. Imagine a normal Tor node that routes traffic. Let's say it is a hidden service, but not in the standard Tor hidden service sense. I will call this a 'meta hidden service', for lack of a better term. The node routes traffic to other nodes or websites as a normal node would. However, users of the 'meta hidden service' send traffic with specially crafted interpacket arrival characteristics through the node. They could send traffic to and from Google for all that it matters, because it is just cover communications. The real communications are encoded in the interpacket arrival characteristics. The Tor node itself looks for a signature that lets it know a secret message is being transmitted, then it decodes the packet arrival characteristics into the binary message. When the reply traffic comes from Google, it encodes the real reply message into the interpacket arrival characteristics in the reply traffic it sends back to the client. This allows for client anonymity still, but unfortunately the location of the 'meta-hidden-service' would have to be known by the clients. The big advantage here is that to an observer, even one who can see the entire Tor network, it looks like the client is merely surfing Google with a particular Tor node, but really they are communicating with a 'meta hidden service' via a covert channel. Interpacket arrival is just one way to do it.

Bitcoin is the spirit of electronic currency. If it is banned or ID required in one country, exchangers will pop up in other countries.

CALEA

Quote from: davebowman on June 02, 2012, 12:45 pm

Once they have a fake reputation, they can announce that they will accept all orders, make a sale or some shit, and start collecting buyer's names and mailing addresses. They organize a massive nationwide sting, and do controlled deliveries all simultaneously on like 30 sr buyers and bust them hard for possession of small quantities. It gets massive media attention and those people are made into examples and get ridiculously unfair sentences.

Then, hundreds of other users will leave SR and new people will be afraid to join because they will all be afraid of going to jail.

I have suspected something along these lines. You have to understand that DEA is under pressure to shut this site down. They may not be able to "crack" Tor and find the server, but if they can spread enough FUD, they can scare away enough people to effectively shut it down. And since most purchases are small, they have an incentive to follow through on controlled deliveries of small packages. Some of them will be SR buyers who will come on the forum and elsewhere talking about their busts.

So they create some fake vendor accounts and sell drugs to themselves through fake buyer accounts. All they lose is SR commission but that's a small price to pay. Once they gain the community's trust, they start taking orders from real buyers and pay everyone a friendly visit. A shitstorm ensues and everyone is too afraid to use SR.

Why haven't they done it yet? Maybe they think they can find the server and DPR, and killing the site through FUD would prevent them from doing that. LE will allow dealers to sell for months under surveillance because the "greater good" is identifying everyone in the network. Assuming SR is well protected, which it sounds like it is, identifying it would be revolutionary because no properly configured hidden service has been identified through a direct attack on the Tor network to date (although some have been identified through misconfigured services).

This is a real test of the technical capabilities of Tor. If it ever happens that a bunch of buyers get busted, then you'll know that LE failed at cracking Tor. If a major sweep of SR buyers never happens, then my assumptions were wrong, and LE is too stupid, lazy or indifferent to SR to follow through. The last and worst option is that they find the server and DPR. The blowback from that would be far reaching, because if FBI or NSA can crack Tor, then potentially any other government or LEA can do it too. That changes the game for millions of people in Iran, Syria, China, etc. They actually have a pretty strong incentive not to crack Tor, or at least suppress all information that they did.

Give me a few thousand dollars and I can trace hidden service . Feds can for sure. Unless they are exceptionally incompetent. All you need to do is put some nodes on Tor. Then you write a little program that opens connections to hidden services, using the machine it is run on as its own rendezvous point (three hops between it and the hidden service). It sends a stream with a detectable pattern in the packet flow. You just send this once and then immediately close the circuit. Then it does this same thing again and again and again. The nodes you add to the network analyze the traffic passing through them looking for the pattern that you have sent to the hidden service. This causes the hidden service to open a new circuit each time, and each time it uses new final and middle node but the same entry guard nodes. This lets you trace to the hidden services entry guards in a matter of minutes. Then you flood the entry guards with create cells to DOS their CPU. They can no longer route traffic while they are DOSed so the hidden service selects new entry guards to use in the mean time. Rinse and repeat. If you can DOS enough identified entry guards eventually the hidden service selects one of yours and then you have its IP address. It costs a lot more processing power for the entry guards to try and process the create cells, than it does to create them. 

If SR has manually overridden Tors default settings to use strict entry guards this will only allow for it to be DOSed but not traced by a purely active attacker. Although once feds have traced to entry guards they can become a passive attacker at one of the entry guards to deanonymize the server. Tor hidden services are not very anonymous, in the grand scheme of things. I certainly would take Tor projects advice, and not rely on Tor for strong anonymity in that specific case. For clients, it is less bad. When it comes to hidden services I really am a big fan of Freenets Freesites. They are less about anonymity per-se and more about extreme censorship resistance via spreading lots of chunks of the site out over a huge network that has no centralized listing of participating nodes. It is more redundancy and censorship resistance than anonymity per-se, but I think that is more the goal for a site like SR. Tor tries to give censorship resistance (but not redundancy) via making it hard to trace the server. Freenet gives censorship resistance and redundancy because there is no centralized server to target, the site is stored across hundreds or thousands of different servers and taking down a subsection of those servers will not take the site down. Also the Freenet servers are not associated with any particular site or any particular content, so there is not the same liability like there is with a Tor hidden service where someone needs to configure a specific server to host a specific site. Tahoe-Lafs is another thing to look into, it also aims to give censorship resistance and redundancy.

But I still prefer Tor for client anonymity, versus Freenet for plausible deniability / anonymity for clients.

People who say buying btc is legal so you have nothing to worry about are the biggest idiots. It is legal to send western union too but that isn't going to save your ass if you send a wire to Pablo Escobar now is it?