devconsole

There's the chance that datacenters will be more inclined to image your server for authorities if you've set up a server using bitcoin and are hosting large amounts of Tor traffic, but at this point we must assume authorities will image your server anyway, so there's no reason not to go this route if it's as good as you say.

You may need anonymous money for other things, but server rental was the primary case I had in mind.

Various assumptions like "I doubt it's that easy" are also the road to getting busted.

Trying to forge or steal legal documents, let alone a license plate that you drive around with and which officers can notice at any time, is also how to get busted.

Did the person you met with write down your license plate number? Seem unlikely? Think again. Cameras write down your license plate number as you drive. Constantly. So the authorities will simply look up where the person drove to meet you (parking lot, etc) and any cars that drove to the area at the time. You'll probably be on a highway at some point, which is a highway of data collection. There weren't that many people who drove a long distance to go to the meetup area. Now the authorities know which of 1,000 people you are. The more times you do this, the fewer the number of suspects there are, until they're down to a number that they can just investigate one by one. Then you're caught.

Or did you take your cell phone with you, and did the person who sold you components take their cell phone? Yes, you're caught. The operation in the previous paragraph, which assumes that you're just driving to meet someone and both parties are leaving their cell phones at home, is already busted. So if you've taken your cell phone on top of it, then it's even easier. Anything involving correlating cell phone movements is trivial for authorities. And if you don't take your cell phone, how are you going to let them know you've arrived? What if they're late? Or you're late? Now you have two problems: Set up a burner phone in an anonymous way (hello, in-store security cameras) and then never, ever use this cell phone in the same place as your main cell phone. Not a good position to be in.

I've ignored the whole "fake ID" aspect, because if you're in a position where someone is putting their face onto a forged legal document, that person is going to be persuaded by authorities to betray you. And if that person is you, then obviously you're caught at this point. Your face is probably on Facebook, and facial recognition software is getting pretty good nowadays.

In general, physical ops are the most dangerous of all ops, and should be avoided until every other avenue has been explored. Better to anonymize your cash (which is also a physical op) and then use that cash to rent a single remote server.

By the way, I'd also like to thank everyone for the thoughtful responses. It's great that people are thinking about this problem.

Or, put another way, if you're relying on Tor's hidden webservice capability as your sole defense, then you're in a bad position.

And if you assume that, then it suddenly becomes very, very bad if you've personally shipped a computer to the datacenter, colocation-style. First, clever hardware won't protect you if it's a running box. But beyond that, you can be traced simply by the components that you've assembled. You have to order those components from somewhere. You have to assume the worst: that authorities will take your box using a power adapter that lets them physically remove the computer from the datacenter without turning it off (such things exist), dump an image of your server while it's running (so that encryption keys won't help you), and then dismantle your server and trace the origin of the components. Congratulations: you're caught.

I think the model of "rent a bunch of servers using opsec" is also precarious, but less precarious than relying on hardware protections to save you.

The common thread across all darknet websites is the fact that they generally run from datacenters. Most people don't host websites from their residence.

Further, most people don't colocate servers anymore. I would be surprised if any of the 414 websites operated on boxes that had been colocated. However I won't rule out that colocating is also compromised.

I'd like to posit the following law of nature: You can't run a darknet website from a datacenter and think you've hidden the location of the server, regardless of whether it's using Tor or other anonymity software.

Why not? Because the datacenter has the ability to image servers, along with the ability to notice that you're generating large amounts of outgoing Tor traffic (or other anonymity software).

Here's how the attack may have happened: Step one, collect data about which computers are sending and receiving large amounts of Tor bandwidth. Step two, if the server resides in a datacenter, request an image of the server. Step three, you now know whether the server is a darknet website.

Remember, the point of Tor is to hide the final IP address of a web request or web service. It does not hide the total volume of traffic that must be delivered. And it can't. If you operate a darknet marketplace, you're probably serving a large volume of traffic. Guess who notices? ISPs and datacenters. Guess which datacenters can be trusted not to divulge an image of your server to authorities? None of them.

What do I think the future of darknet opsec will look like? Well, if you're reading this, and you're an individual or group interested in pursuing your ideology through a darknet website, you will need to run your website from a datacenter and not rent your server in your name. In fact, your opsec needs to be so good that there's no way to trace the account back to you. This sounds hard, and it is, but it's possible. Secondly, you must assume at all times that the server you're using is compromised. Assume that aurhorities can access the contents of the server, can manipulate it, and can subvert anything you put on it.

This is a grim situation, to be sure. The above assumption is that you are never safe from authorities gaining a copy of the contents of your datacenter-hosted darknet website (including any databases), and from a takedown of the service whenever authorities deem to do so.

Here's the ray of hope: Just because they takedown your website doesn't mean they take you down. This is where opsec comes into play, and it's our last hope. Every other link in the chain of trust for darknet websites has been broken. The one and only chance is that you can figure out a way to create accounts at datacenters without authorities being able to trace them back to you.

Authorities takedown your service? Okay, start it again at some other datacenter. Authorities get a copy of what's on your server? Okay, no problem: you were assuming it was compromised anyway, right? Authorities install a program to make your software malfunction? That's unfortunate, and will shake the trust in your website, but it's possible to recover from this.

Do your best, and do not get caught. The rest follows from this.

At a minimum, you need to research opsec. Read history of how groups have evaded detection. Do your research using Tor, because associating such Google searches with your home account is a terrible mistake.

One of your biggest problems is going to be anonymous money. No, bitcoin won't help you. You can't rent a server from a datacenter using bitcoin. But you can anonymize your money and then use that money to rent your server.

It's a long shot, but it's all we've got left. Be perfect. There's no room for error. Or realize the truth: If you can't be perfect, you will get caught. And you may get caught anyway. Being perfect sounds impossible, but human history has shown that there are situations in which no or few mistakes are made. I would recommend you research those situations and how to minimize the total number of mistakes you make. Use software to help you do this, while realizing that clever software alone won't be enough. For example, if you're configuring an individual piece of software on your personal computer to connect to your darknet website, even through Tor, you're doing it wrong. You need to isolate yourself from this equation at all times. Sound hard? Oh, it's hard. It will slowly dawn on you how hard this method of operating is. Convenience? No. You don't get to enjoy the benefits of convenience. Convenience is the opposite of security.

Oh, and if you do happen to somehow make a lot of money, you should keep it as bitcoin for the forseeable future. What good is it? Maybe converting small amounts won't be noticed. On the other hand, converting large amounts of bitcoin to dollars will be noticed, and it's extraordinarily dangerous to your opsec.

I'll be around to answer questions if you have them. If you'd like to ask a question anonymously using Tor, create a new HN account and post your question. I'll see it, but it will show up as dead on HN, so I won't be able to reply to it directly. So I'll reply to my own comment with a copy of your question, along with a response. Then you can reply to that, and I'll repeat the process.

HN is one of the few websites that we can even have these kinds of conversations on using Tor. Everything on Reddit is autokilled. 4chan doesn't let you use Tor. Maybe we should work on this problem first: How to make the equivalent of unlisted Tor exit nodes so that Tor isn't so trivially blocked?

There are a lot of ideas in my comment, and some of them are better than others. I hope that the bad ideas can be discarded and the good ones refined until we have someting workable.

This is what happens today. Not in some far off distant distopioan future meant to invoke fear in the ignorant/lazy.

Why not talk with me without the snark? This topic seems like it interests you a lot, so it seems like we have some shared ground.

one can clone the sc[1] and go through the source code for what could possibly define one as a Tails user, replace that with something else, build their own image and voila, you just avoided being in the dragnet.

This won't work because it's extremely difficult to analyze your network card and discover its behavior, and without this knowledge you'd be changing things blindly. There are far too many ways to detect an OS to change them all. Tweak-and-recompile would work if they use a naive and brittle heuristic like "look for the first 64 bytes of whatever is loaded into memory when Tails is booting up," but they wouldn't employ such a brittle heuristic in the first place because every time a new version of Tails is released, they'd need to update their entire infrastructure to look for a new pattern. Something like monitoring the network traffic for a unique "Tails signature" is more likely in this scenario; for example, how many computers start Tor immediately after a network card is connected? Detecting that condition would be a decent starting point for detecting Tails, and they'd want to combine it with some other hard-to-evade condition to cut down on false positives without introducing false negatives.

One interesting way to detect that someone is using Tails would be to notice that their system clock is set to UTC time. Most of the computers connected to the internet aren't using UTC, so UTC time plus Tor usage on startup is pretty commonly associated with anonymity OS's. That said, it seems like it might be difficult for the network card to detect whether the system clock is UTC time, but it's just an example of how difficult it is to fully conceal your usage of an anonymity tool. It's not just a matter of tweaking the source code.

This seems to prove the seriousness of this threat, though. Once you agree that it might be possible for your network card to be your adversary, there are endless ways that it can be used to defeat you. Hardware manufacturers have evidently been thinking along these lines, so why shouldn't we try to think of ways to prevent this from happening? As the BIOS exploits have shown, that dystopianic future may be closer than anyone's comfortable admitting.

EDIT: Someone went through and downvote bombed our whole converastion on both sides... I tried to correct it, but it looks like upvotes from Tor users under a certain karma threshold aren't registering, so I wasn't able to help fix it.

The tools of law enforcement probably aren't going to be revealed, and they're hard to discover. Nobody knew about the zero-day exploit employed against Tor browser, for example, and there are almost certainly many more tricks like that up their sleeve. They already take steps to conceal them; parallel construction is an unfortunate reality. And since there's not much justification for a whistleblower to reveal the techniques, it's unlikely someone will come out and talk about them. We'll probably need to think along the lines of "What's technologically possible, and how is it useful to law enforcement?" It's not a good idea to wait until a weapon is used before thinking about how to react to it.

The history of communications technology and how governments have reacted to the technology is actually quite fascinating. Wiretaps used to be extremely commonplace, and since there's not too much legal protection from the government rifling through your digital life at will (at least compared to getting permission for wiretapping your phone), it seems like it's better to err on the side of caution.

It's also important to realize that even though some governments follow due process, several powerful ones don't. Also, there are other global other considerations. The US has made it pretty clear that their legal restrictions are designed to apply to US citizens, not any foreign person. You may be forced into a situation of choosing which governments you'll trust, especially when cross-nation collaboration becomes even more pervasive. Assuming that other countries adopt a similar attitude of "Our citizens are protected; other citizens are examined," then the US may simply outsource their databases of information to be examined by some other government, like any other member of the Five Eyes.

I understand your concern and skepticism though. It was a question I've often wrestled with myself.

If you concede that your computer has a chip with DMA access which can be used by the government, then you must concede that the same chip can monitor you for activity that triggers active surveillance. For example, I think Tails is going to force governemnts into monitoring at least which operating system you're using. There's no way to target a specific Tails user, so the only recourse is for the government to do dragnet surveillance of everyone using Tails, or ignore the activities of those using Tails. Since the latter seems politically untenable, the former is becoming more likely with time. When the government can passively check whether your activity is fitting the pattern of some kind of criminal activity, the situation is about as asymmetric as I can imagine. Is there really any technical knowledge that could protect you?

I didn't intend to argue that. I'm saying that strong anonymity OS's like Tails will force governments to do dragnet surveillance using compromised hardware in order to track suspects down. There is no way to tailor surveillance to an individual using Tails, because it's set up to hide your IP address at the OS level (assuming Tails is implemented correctly).

Assume child molestors begin using Tails or whatever environment that prevents FBI browser exploits from working. What then? There's one recourse: the government can set up your network card to monitor when you're using Tails for unlawful activity. And since it's very difficult to come up with a "footprint" of an individual Tails user, i.e. some way to monitor or attack one specific individual, this is likely to force the government into monitoring all activity. This can be done via compromised hardware, like a network card, which can be remotely configured to monitor memory for specific trigger conditions like "user is running Tails, and main memory contains specific terms for underage children."

Sure, it sounds unlikely right now. But this is the general direction that technology has been headed in. How much ground should we concede in this debate? Is it ethical for a government to be able to subvert someone using strong anonymity tools if it forces them to broadly target everyone using such a tool?

More broadly, what mechanism should we approve of the government using to inject your computer with code? If the government has DMA access to everyone's computer, then that hardware could be configured to monitor which operating system you're using, and only triggered into actively targetting you specifically when certain conditions arise, such as using a strong anonymity tool, or a certain specialized browser that child pornographers also happen to use. Should the government be allowed to be proactive in its hunt for offenders? Are we comfortable with a hardware device watching which OS we're running? There are a lot of issues that seem worth thinking carefully about.