Little is known about how U.S. and European law enforcement shut down more than 400 websites, including Silk Road 2.0, which used technology that hides their true IP addresses. The websites were set up using a special feature of the Tor network, which is designed to mask people’s Internet use using special software that routes encrypted browsing traffic through a network of worldwide servers.
The Tor Project, is a nonprofit that relies in part on donations. The project “currently doesn’t have funding for improving the security of hidden services,” wrote Andrew Lewman, the project’s executive director, in a blog post on Sunday. ( https://blog.torproject.org/blog/thoughts-and-concerns-about-operation-onymous )
It is possible that a remote-code execution vulnerability has been found in Tor’s software, or that the individual sites had flaws such as SQL injection vulnerabilities. But Lewman wrote The Tor Project had little information on the methods used by law enforcement in the latest action.
“Tor is most interested in understanding how these services were located and if this indicates a security weakness in Tor hidden services that could be exploited by criminals or secret police repressing dissents,” he wrote.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2845352/tor-project-mulls-how-feds-took-down-hidden-websites.html
[Related]: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-need-some-love
Can anybody help Andrew Lewman understand what happened ?
(Score: 2) by mrchew1982 on Tuesday November 11 2014, @01:02AM
Your post Makes me wonder if it would be possible to make up secure USB sticks and mail them to potential users, and if that would bypass any of the surveillance systems in place. Of course the physical distribution of the stick would open another vulnerability... Maybe a pass along system with each stick able to make an exact byte-level copy of itself?
I also wonder if fragmentation might be a good thing in this case, instead of having one silk road server with thousands of users, make hundreds of servers with less than a thousand users each. Of course that would ruin the bazaar model so there would have to either be some kind of reputation system to give you access to more servers or some kind of back end to distribute the listings, once again making potential vulnerabilities.
Idk if its possible to outsmart/outwit the law enforcement systems in place, going up against someone with unlimited power and almost limited budget seems foolhardy at best.