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So long Silk Road

irishScott said:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/02/fbi-seize-deep-web-marketplace-silk-road-arrest-owner/

Nabbed by the FBI. No details on how they managed to find its physical location, but I imagine they found a way to compromise the site and ping its location like they did with Freedom Hosting.

Moral of the story: If you want to defy the law for an extended period of time, your security has to define "perfection."
Click to expand...

I can't believe anyone really thinks they can hide very illegal shit behind TOR for too long.

If it's something the government would, under any other circumstances, really invest time and effort to track and hunt you down for... there's nothing stopping them from doing the same across TOR. It's not exactly secure. It just obfuscates things.
It's better for short-term utility as opposed to anything lasting long term. Long term still builds a long enough and VERY traceable history. Yes, governments can easily trace through TOR. It just makes it a little more troublesome and is only done with the fish to be caught is juicy enough, or if at least makes large enough splashes to draw attention.
 
rudeguy said:
thats just dumb

Why would you order drugs online?
Click to expand...

It was more eBay than Amazon. You found a dealer with good ratings and stuff you wanted, then contacted them individually, usually through some form of encrypted email or messaging. Silk road took their cut of the bitcoins (the transactions were the only communication taking place via the site) and that was that. Only the individual dealers knew your address, and Silk Road doesn't know anything about the dealers other than their screen name. Whole process/site was highly decentralized. They managed to take down the site, but I doubt they caught many of the dealers.

For the record I never used it, but I know people who did. This is how it was explained to me.
 
Tor does not have node-to-node encryption. So the Feds probably took advantage of that and brought enough of their own nodes online to be able to track activity occurring through Tor.
 
IEC said:
Tor does not have node-to-node encryption. So the Feds probably took advantage of that and brought enough of their own nodes online to be able to track activity occurring through Tor.
Click to expand...

Uh, yeah it does. Only the exit node can see the decrypted information.

htw2.png


An attack like what you describe is still possible, but it would take a ridiculous number of nodes given the size of tor.
 
irishScott said:
Uh, yeah it does. Only the exit node can see the decrypted information.

htw2.png


An attack like what you describe is still possible, but it would take a ridiculous number of nodes given the size of tor.
Click to expand...

You don't think the government has access to botnets?
 
Crusty said:
You don't think the government has access to botnets?
Click to expand...

I think that tor has many thousands of nodes at any given time, and anyone connecting to tor makes a unique route of 3 nodes that can shift over the course of the session.

I don't know enough to run precise math on it, but in effect the government would need to own all 3 nodes in a given route to trace a single communication, and unless they owned the exit node they wouldn't know what the communication is. The sheer probabilities involved are ridiculous, but given the popularity of silk road they probably had more connections to potentially trace, I suppose.

I'm curious as to what will happen when tor simply extends the number of nodes per connection.
 
tommo123 said:
isn't a problem with tor that people dont tend to update the software?
Click to expand...

That was a problem not too long ago, specifically with the tor browser bundle. There were javascript exploits in the version of Firefox that was bundled with tor. These exploits had already been patched in a recent update, but very few had updated. So a few tor users using the older version were exploited and had their locations revealed, making tor all but useless for them.

But this isn't any different than what's seen elsewhere. People in general don't update their software as they should. Usually they can get away with this, but when we're talking security software...
 
irishScott said:
It was more eBay than Amazon. You found a dealer with good ratings and stuff you wanted, then contacted them individually, usually through some form of encrypted email or messaging. Silk road took their cut of the bitcoins (the transactions were the only communication taking place via the site) and that was that. Only the individual dealers knew your address, and Silk Road doesn't know anything about the dealers other than their screen name. Whole process/site was highly decentralized. They managed to take down the site, but I doubt they caught many of the dealers.

For the record I never used it, but I know people who did. This is how it was explained to me.
Click to expand...

+1
 
Heh... Bitcoin is down to $80 from a $125 high on BTC-E today as I write this.

So much for people starting to take Bitcoin seriously as a legit currency. You shut down their favorite drug buy site, and the whole economy collapses.
 
ultimatebob said:
So much for people starting to take Bitcoin seriously as a legit currency. You shut down their favorite drug buy site, and the whole economy collapses.
Click to expand...

People were never starting to take bitcoin seriously as money, just trying to unload their stash to a greater fool. :hmm:
 
First I've heard of this site. It won't change anything. People will still participate in the underground free market.
 
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