Silk Road forums

Discussion => Security => Topic started by: ikalihi812 on March 06, 2012, 08:17 pm

Title: How do cops find Tor Hidden Services?
Post by: ikalihi812 on March 06, 2012, 08:17 pm
How do they do it? It's in the news alot.
Title: Re: How do cops find Tor Hidden Services?
Post by: klaaat21 on March 06, 2012, 08:20 pm
If you found it, why would you think they couldn't find it?
Title: Re: How do cops find Tor Hidden Services?
Post by: kmfkewm on March 06, 2012, 08:22 pm
The only time LE have demonstrated that they traced hidden services, it was the result of applications being hacked. If you root a hidden service, you can get its IP address, unless you root an environment that is isolated away from external IP address, in which case you would need to break out of the isolation.

There are numerous ways they could trace hidden services with pure traffic analysis, but so far they have never revealed that they have actually done this.
Title: Re: How do cops find Tor Hidden Services?
Post by: ikalihi812 on March 06, 2012, 08:24 pm
so whats the point of tor hidden service if the cops can just bust you anytime? i just did a google search and apparently they can just bust down the server at the source
Title: Re: How do cops find Tor Hidden Services?
Post by: kmfkewm on March 06, 2012, 08:25 pm
You are going to need to give a link to a specific case for me to comment on it
Title: Re: How do cops find Tor Hidden Services?
Post by: ikalihi812 on March 06, 2012, 08:40 pm
http://blog.cyberwar.nl/2011/09/dutch-police-investigation-tor-spike.html
Title: Re: How do cops find Tor Hidden Services?
Post by: kmfkewm on March 06, 2012, 09:12 pm
Those hidden services were traced after being hacked by the police. Some of them were not traced, because they used isolation that the police could not break out of (pretty sure they were using virtualbox for isolation actually, although of course hardware or paravirtualization or OS virtualization are better as was discussed at length in other threads).

Not a failure of Tor in these cases but a failure of the people who ran those sites to keep them fully patched.