So - how to do it correctly? The onion server should not be able to access the internet directly and should never know it's own IP-address. So putting it inside a virtual machine/container and redirecting outgoing traffic through Tor (on another VM) should fix that.
As for the backend servers - if all machines are connected through OpenVPN with TLS-Auth they can use private IP space and are not accessible from outside. The OpenVPN tunnels are configured outside of the onion VM and Tor VM and the backend machines are also in a VM that pipes all outgoing traffic (except OpenVPN traffic) to the internet through Tor.
This setup should at least omit the problem of leaking public IP addresses on compromise or did I overlook something? Let's ignore VM outbreak exploits (ksplice/unattenend-upgrades should help here if it's not the NSA).
With TLS-Auth and a default DROP firewall rule all machines should not even appear in scans on the internet. So any outside contact to any machines is only possible if you know the OpenVPN TLS-Key + Certificates. An intruder would only see local IP addresses even if he manages to compromise a backend server. All created outgoing traffic to find the machines would be routed through Tor.
As the Tor onion VM is separate from the webserver only a Tor remote exploit or a VM outbreak exploit would be critical. Maybe encryption can help here.
Another point is using dedicated hardware with Full Disk Encryption and just enter the passphrase via the provider console. There are cold boot attacks but VPS servers allow to dump a memory image while running - that's not so easy with dedicated hardware.
If I were doing this, I would not use a VM for it. Running on bare metal has a significantly smaller (by several orders of magnitude) risk profile and is much simpler to do right. I'd have three boxes: webserver, Tor server, external exposure box. The webserver would connect solely to the Tor server, and would expose absolutely nothing other than HTTP. The Tor server would run the hidden service pieces and would expose nothing to either side, but would connect to the webserver and tunnel things accordingly, and would send its Tor connections through the external box. The external box would have a simple forwarder to tunnel connections to the Tor server.
There are always going to be bugs, but this would very strongly isolate each of the risky components. Feeling even more paranoid? Put a strong network filter in place between each of the components to make sure that only the specific subset of TCP that's actually in use makes it through; that'll prevent network stack-level issues.
> The onion server should not be able to access the internet directly and should never know it's own IP-address.
I may be overly pedantic here but it should be "public IP address" as there is no TCP/IP without an IP address. The address may be in the private ranges, though.
Say you have your own hardware, what would you need to access the display and keyboard securely remotely over the network? Are there such devices available? I imagine you can have the OS disable its display and keyboard input after boot for added security, and lock down the boot process, but it still seems like it's hard to do this securely. I'm trying to think of a scenario where you can have:
1) Full Disk Encryption
2) Two physical machines owned by you, perhaps stored in some basement
3) Be able to boot them back on without physical access (perhaps this is simply a Bad Idea?)
4) One machine with two NICs running Tor, exposing only Tor to one of the NICs
5) The other machine running a VM host with 1 VM for each of your services. The host is connected to the NIC of the first machine, thus only has access to the internet through Tor
The computers run a small client program in the initial RAM disk environment which will communicate with a server over a network. All network communication is encrypted using TLS. The clients are identified by the server using an OpenPGP key; each client has one unique to it. The server sends the clients an encrypted password. The encrypted password is decrypted by the clients using the same OpenPGP key, and the password is then used to unlock the root file system, whereupon the computers can continue booting normally.
Dropbear (SSH access) still requires you to manually log in and unlock the disks; a primary feature of Mandos is that it can boot completely unattended (unless configured otherwise).
Mandos can be configured to be not automatic by setting the “approved_by_default” option for a client to “False” in the clients.conf file; See mandos-clients.conf(5): (http://www.recompile.se/mandos/man/mandos-clients.conf.5).
You also need to adjust the “approval_delay” setting.
It’s just the CAcert certificate which doesn’t exist in Chrome. Either ignore it or install the CAcert root certificate from http://www.cacert.org/?id=3
> Frankly it is also immoral. This guy was selling drugs without caring about the consequences on people's lives, medical and otherwise and was organizing assassinations.
Frankly, the War on Drugs is immoral. The science doesn't back it up[1]. It's done without caring about the consequences on peoples' lives, medical and otherwise.
> This is not the FBI enforcing the letter of some stupid law
Debatable! The drug laws are 'stupid', if you take into account science and economics[2].
> and was organizing assassinations.
This is unlikely to have happened under a system of legal drugs. I've never heard of Walmart -- where legal products are sold -- putting out hits on people.
The drugs laws are broken. They create perverse incentives.
> This is unlikely to have happened under a system of legal drugs. I've never heard of Walmart -- where legal products are sold -- putting out hits on people.
Selling diamonds is not illegal but I've heard allegations of hits being put out there.
The drug laws are bad. But a la A Man for All Seasons, we should give the devil the benefit of law; what silk road does would cut a path through every law in the country.
I always thought that the statement "give the devil the benefit of law" meant that we should be especially careful to follow the law to the letter, __even__ when dealing with people that we think Deserve To Be Punished (because they're bad! They're evil!), because doing otherwise is a slippery slope towards treating other people with less than the utmost care for following the rules.
Regardless of how you feel about drugs, he also hosted (and profited from) markets for identity theft tools, hacking tools, and he tried to have his enemies assassinated.
Only sociopaths and libertarians are holding him up as some bastion of morality.
People are becoming increasingly interested in the case because it's looking probable that enforcement/prosecution has done something untoward.
Everybody has an interest in law enforcement operating under the rules that supposed to constrain its behavior.
If the prosecution can straight up lie to the court about how evidence is gathered with impunity, then at the very least it may be an effective strategy to raise the cost of effective defense.
More scarily, it may be used to cover up useful lines of defense.
In every case, you should imagine an innocent man accused, and consider whether the tactics used against him are designed to demonstrate the truth, to cast artifacts in a false light, or to raise the odds of conviction regardless of the truth.
We should never convict on the strength of the information that someone has been charged.
I haven't heard anything regarding his alleged hit since he was originally arrested. It's also not one of the formal charges brought against him, which is odd because it's significantly more damning than running a marketplace for drugs.
Identify theft and hacking tools are both pretty (a|im)moral, though.
"This is unlikely to have happened under a system of legal drugs. I've never heard of Walmart -- where legal products are sold -- putting out hits on people."
Take a look into the dirty underside of the distribution (of legal goods) industry and you will find intimidation and violence used.
Thr prohibition of drugs and organized crime are highly linked. Look at alchohol as an example. For all intents and purposes the war on drugs is a war against poor minoritites. All research has shown that it is not only innefectvie, but detrimental to families and communities.
You didn't respond to what your parent post said. You just opened up some canned rhetoric and dumped it onto the page.
Are you in agreement that it's ok for people to commit drug-related murders just because the War on Drugs is "bad m'kay?" Or should people be held accountable for their actions? Just because there are incentives to become a drug lord due to immoral laws doesn't mean that it's all of the sudden moral to become a drug lord. You seem to want to use your "War on Drugs is bad" opinion as an excuse for the choices that people make.
I can't down vote this for some reason but it should be. Asking someone if they believe murder is ok with righteous indignation is absurd.
The comment pointed out that crime in general around drugs - up to and including murder - is much more prevalent because of the War On Drugs.
There is no moral absolutism in this world, and the government can absolutely enact laws and policies that lead to increased crime rates. Of course the perpetrator of a murder should be held to full account. But the circumstances that create the motive for murder in drug cases are at least partially due to government policies that have been proven to be a failure over and over again.
@jamespo said "Well that's the weakest excuse for ordering someone to be murdered I've read today"
Responding to that with some canned rhetoric around how drug-related murders would be fewer in a post War on Drugs world it's really a response to that post.
I have no righteous indignation. I'm frustrated that the conversation is going like this:
Person 1: Ordering an assassination is bad, and saying that
the War on Drugs is bad isn't an excuse for it.
Person 2: But if the War On Drugs didn't exist, then
drug-related murder wouldn't exist! Perverse
incentives!
> Of course the perpetrator of a murder should be held to full account.
This is the point that I see some of these "War no Drugs == Bad" posts dancing around. They ignore this in favour of using this story as a platform to preach their views.
We can likely all agree murder is almost always bad, and murder over drugs is categorically bad.
So when someone asks for an acknowledgment that murder is bad from another person, it's almost ad hominem, or so it seems to me.
So the debate is whether or not government policies create incentives or motive for crime. There are several documented reasons [1] that good people do bad things, and creating an environment for that isn't helping anyone.
It's not to say that the murderer is less to blame, but culpability isn't something that reduces criminal responsibility.
This argument seems to be whether Ulbricht was acting immorally though, not if the "War on Drugs" should vanish. I think it's quite clear that Ulbricht deserves prosecution considering how he put hits on 2 people without hesitation, and even believed that the 2 hits were carried out successfully still without hesitation.
I am not in agreement that its ok to commit murder because the war on drugs is bad. Those people should be held accountable for their actions to the full extent of the law.
I do believe that there are steps policy makers could take to remove the amount of people who find themselves incentivized to commit violent crimes.
I agree that the war on drugs, though misguided, should not shoulder the blame for the actions of violent offenders, but two wrongs don't make a right.
Is calling for changes to draconian and detrimental policies and condemning those individuals who commit violent crimes mutually exclusive?
Imagine if the government started paying people to break into houses. You would obviously be mad at your neighbor if they took advantage of the new policy, and rightfully so, but you would be a lot more upset at the government for even allowing the situation to happen.
Seems like a lot of this hand-wringing is unnecessary. No one is condoning free-enterprise murder. That's just not a fair reading of any posts I have seen, so far.
legalizing drugs will not get rid of he black market. As we've see with medical mj, it's taxed heavily and more expensive than you can get from a local dealer. Many people don't want t pay this price.
We've seen similar things with cigarettes in some areas.
But I would have to assume that the majority of people wishing to partake in such drugs would prefer the legal route if it is available to them. Unless you're talking an obscene amount of difference in pricing. But then the free market should kick in because if the government wants the tax revenue the pricing will have to be adjusted.
Of course, I'm never shocked to see governments plan to spend all that nice new tax revenue that never appears due to their own policies.
Of course not, but this is the difference between prohibition era levels of black market participation and current day alcohol black market dealing. Sure, people still make moonshine, and there's a bit of traffic in things like illegal cigarettes (guy tried to sell me singles yesterday), but its far less than truckloads coming over the border to fill our demand.
> This is unlikely to have happened under a system of legal drugs. I've never heard of Walmart -- where legal products are sold -- putting out hits on people.
> The drugs laws are broken. They create perverse incentives.
So... when the laws are wrong, it's ok to murder people. It's the government's fault that you murdered people because they created perverse incentives, therefore you shouldn't go to jail for attempting to murder people?
[Edit] parent post responded to "tried to have people assassinated" with some rhetoric about perverse incentives. Sure with better incentives, it might not have happened, but the parent post comes across as giving DPR a free pass because the incentives were perverse.
That is far too nuanced a position to take here on Hacker News.
What's next, the suggestion that MongoDB has certain use-cases that make it preferable over normal SQL databases while at the same time lacking some of their guarantees?
I've got to say: this thread level had me confused until you sorta just pointed at it. Somehow an argument happened/started, but I couldn't tell from where or why (especially since one of the root comments is dead now).
The parent post comes across to you as giving DPR a free pass. IMO this says much more about you than it does about the parent post. I see no such implication myself.
I think you're ignoring the context of the parent post. The topic of the post Multics was commenting on wasn't "Is DPR a sketchy dude?" It was closer to "Supporting operations like Silk Road is inherently immoral. Look at all the bad juju around this. Surely anyone who isn't against drugs is evil, agreed?"
I think it's still an overstatement to even say that no one would be murdered over drugs if they were legal. For example, there are gangs that specialize in things like illegal movement of cigarettes between areas where the taxes/import duties are different. While not as large as it would be were cigarettes to be completely illegal, you can't say that it will go to zero.
Your thought process is simplistic. It's not ok to murder good people, but it's ok to murder bad people. DPR was trying to kill an extortionist threatening to sell out Silk Road users to the police, which would have resulted in many families being destroyed. He definitely deserved death.
It's illegal already to explain to setup a secure hidden service on the Tor network? I don't think this discussion is only relevant to criminals. There are a lot of places on this planet where this information might be useful.
I don't support the Silk Road - never used it - I don't even use Tor a lot by myself. But if someone is coming at me and tells me that this information is forbidden I'll get angry.
It's not like there is a drug problem besides Silk Road already. It's likely safe to assume that illegal drugs are consumed in near distance to your and my place right now. I don't think the Silk Road is a good place but it's likely better than your shady dealer on the schoolyard. If you ask why people use drugs than take a look at society at large.
What exactly is illegal here? I'm also not located in the US.
When you get to a point where government agencies fabricate evidence in order to incriminate people that they "know" are guilty, they are acting as judge, jury and executioner, and undermining the whole system of justice on which our democratic societies are built. And that has much graver consequences than letting a few supposed criminals slip through the net.
> undermining the whole system of justice on which our democratic societies are built
That's cute. Our Societies are built on the labor of the underclass, on lies and deception and on violent turf wars. Talk about justice.
What about gun-manuals? How about teaching people to drive? Teaching them to use a knife? Makeup classes? Wig instruction manuals? Zipping files with encryption? SSL?
The list goes on and on and on. All those things help criminals evade capture, or to commit some sort of crime. You've just drawn some arbitrary line (drivers education ok, tor setup advice bad) because you have absolutely no idea what makes one worse and the other not.
I'd love to see what laws you're breaking, as that would be at the level of "thought police". How do you know he's helping criminals, is Tor and hidden services just used by criminals in your mind?
Yes - he broke the law, but that does not mean that the FBI should get a pass for doing something shady. If we start to accept that kind of behaviour from them, I can only imagine how it will be 20-30 years from now.
Explaining how something works is not illegal in the US. Not sure why you think it is.
Most people don't feel sorry for the guy but we don't want the country to turn in to a lawless place where law enforcement doesn't have to follow the law.
Where I live it is required to be reasonably convinced that a specific person or persons exist that you are helping[1] commit a crime. If you just publish information that helps the general criminal public then the freedom of speech & information trumps the potential harm done to society.
Plus, you're usually also helping the security community. If they know the criminals can do attack X, they can protect against X (no security from obscurity).
[1] Although you don't have to know their identity.
Criminal is an opinion about a person, but a conviction is a fact. For people outside the U.S., it may help to understand that our constitution stipulates that a person is not to be considered or treated as guilty without a conviction.
If the nginx configuration for port 443 did indeed not restrict access to [star].php, then that means that index.php would have been accessible to the Internet at large (although HTML elements with other suffixes - e.g. .jpg, .css, .js - would not have been served).
If the CAPTCHA element's URL also ended in .php, then it's not beyond the realms of possibility that Tarbell could type the IP address, followed by /index.php and end up seeing a screwed-up version of the SR home page, with the CAPTCHA as he describes in his testimony.
The log file entries cited are for port 80, whereas the SR webserver ran on port 443.
If the defence already have all the log files, they should grep for 199.170.71.133 in the 443 logs and/or search for a group of log file entries with simultaneous successful serves of anything ending in .php, with "permission denied" failures for things not ending in .php
The evidence submitted by the FBI [1] shows the phpmyadmin page running on address 192.168.1.24. Are they claiming to have connected over the internet to a public facing RFC1918 address and it was routable?
(Saying that, I'm now realising that I could knock up a similar screenshot showing me connecting to any "real-world" IP address anyway; it seems to prove nothing.
Talk about burying the lede! Even though he starts off by saying the data confirms the "parallel construction" theory, he proceeds to poke a hole in the defense's claim - that someone wouldn't have been able to access the login page (I am too tired to determine whether or not he's correct about this), and then proposes a possible mechanism (scanning the entire Internet for pages containing a term) which, although it would technically constitute "parallel construction" in that it wasn't mentioned by the prosecution, need not have anything to do with the NSA and could have been done (with enough time) by anyone.
If he's right that the quoted configuration file doesn't do what the defense said it did as part of their accusations of lying, they've seriously messed up, no matter what the truth is.
> The second problem is that some of the details are impossible, such as seeing the IP address in the "packet headers".
If the frontend server in Germany is reverse proxying through to the backend server in Iceland, then sure, a user is not going to see the Icelandic server's IP in the source IP field of the packets. But I don't see this as definitive proof of the FBI's assertion being a flat out lie. The IP could easily have been exposed in the packet body.
What happens if you visited the captcha URL with a HTTP/1.0 request without Host header? If the resulting URL generated any self-referential links, what did they use as the hostname? If the Host header is available the norm is to use this, but if not then the script may use the server's FQDN or IP address. If it sent a 301/302 redirect in the HTTP response headers, then that _must_ contain a hostname according to the RFC (it shouldn't be relative), so what was used there? There's nothing in the nginx config that rewrote such response headers.
What happens if you make malformed requests to the captcha URL? Do you get an error page with the IP address embedded, or something that references an object hosted on the IP?
These are just two possibilities, and yes, neither would lead to the IP being exposed in the 'packet headers'. But it's very feasible for it to be exposed in the packet body, so it seems silly to hang the entire argument on the basis that one word is correct, without considering the alternatives.
In both the cases you site would there be a trail of those requests in the server log files? If so they could have been (or will be) pointed to by the prosecution. Since the prosecution has an image of the server they should be able to demonstrate the point if needed. If they can't then I think it casts doubt on their story.
You'll see the requests in nginx's access logs, but it might be very hard to isolate them. These would not show the response data (only the length and the response code).
But you're right, I'd expect that whatever tactic they used, the prosecution should be able to demonstrate in far more depth how the IP leaked.
I know for a fact that there was a source disclosure MySQL injection bug on many of the pages in SR.
There was also other MySQL Injection bugs. You could even look through the SR forum archive and find people talking about how the search field at one point was exploitable by the standard "' or 'a'='a" and was disclosing customer's names and addresses.
It would be a big step forward. The government would be unable to use anything that it obtained from the server in their prosecution. This may make it impossible to prove that he ran Silk Road. I think he has several other charges though, including multiple counts of solicitation to commit murder. Those may well involve evidence from outside the server that would be unaffected by this.
Given this, the odds of DPR ever seeing the light of day, even if they win this suppression motion, are quite small. He is looking at multiple life sentences even without Silk Road specific charges. But his lawyers are going through piece by piece, hoping to convince prosecutors that it will be difficult enough to get convictions that they offer him a substantial, but less than life, prison sentence in exchange for a plea. Even then we're talking about decades in prison.
This could also be a HUGE step for all anti-parallel construction cases out there. Not only will it embolden other lawyers to look for details in their cases that might point to parallel construction, therefore leading to more such discoveries, but the government should also freak out that their parallel-constructed cases (I assume they have at least hundreds we don't know about, possibly thousands) would get invalidated, and might actually stop getting information this way.
> the government ... might actually stop getting information this [parallel construction] way
lololol. They'll just smooth the practice over with some new laws which, like every other blatantly unconstitutional law currently in effect, won't be overturned by the courts because doing so would upset the status quo.
The only way it'll ever stop is when the fuckers are finally bankrupt, both economically and socially.
All evidence from the server, and anything obtained subsequently because of the server evidence, would be inadmissible (i.e., it could not be presented to the jury). The burden is on the prosecution to prove DPR guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and so their job gets a lot harder. Probably before it gets to trial, the prosecution could be sufficiently concerned about their ability to convict that they let DPR plead guilty to some lesser charge.
No. It's federal, they seriously don't like him, he's never walking. At some point a judge will come up with a bullshit ruling that covers the feds' collective ass, and he'll die in a cage.
I thought it was a foregone conclusion that the NSA uses its massive surveillance network to do traffic analysis on all entrance and exit nodes.
What we're seeing here is called "parallel construction". The FBI was given this illegally obtained surveillance data, made the arrest, and then needed to make up a lie as to how they really found him.
This is actually a legal convention, not arrogance. Look at criminal complaints for other computer crimes (child pornography, hacking, etc.) and the language is identical.
The original charges against Ulbricht, as well as his defense attorney's responses, both include this kind of "I am an expert" language. This is most likely a convention of legal writing, not technical writing.
Not quite, Silk Road document is using very neutral and "objective" kind of speech, c.f. "Based on my training and experience, Silk Road has emerged as the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet today." [0]
I thought he pressed that point a little as well but assuming his lack of writing skills disqualifies his security opinion is a bit of a far jump to me.
Is it time to have special judges/jury who understand the technical details of such cases? I can't seem to even think as to how a judge/jury with no technical expertise would understand the fine print of the details being given out by the lawyers.
It's interesting to parallel to medical cases. Ordinarily, a jury uses their own judgment to decide if someone was negligent measured against ordinary standards of care. But in a medical malpractice case, they decide instead whether someone failed to adhere to accepted medical practice. That gives the medical community a lot of power, because they get to set the standard of practice, and testimony about a specific doctor's actions is always filtered through a medical expert witness.
To date, engineers have not been given similar consideration, probably because they're not independent and their employers would force them to abuse the privilege. E.g. automotive engineers would say "oh, it's totally acceptable to have that exploding gas tank" and software engineers would say "oh, it's totally okay for that to lose all your data."
Barring special consideration like that, it comes down to the expert witnesses. The jury will decide based on which expert they find more credible / whose lawyers do the best job of presenting their expert.
I think expert witnesses serve that purpose. There have been complicated technical details in jury trials before the internet and this seems to be an adequate way to solve the problem.
The problem with expert witnesses is that the skill required to tell which expert is more credible is the same skill that each expert claims to represent best. And then you have the outright liars who have made their careers being expert liars in court, like Dr. Michael West, who are not backed up by the medical community, but by prosecutors.
Can someone who knows things about things address this item in the errattasec article:
> BTW: one plausible way of having discovered the server is to scan the entire Internet for SSL certificates, then correlate information in those certificates with the information found going across the Tor onion connection.
Would this be considered parallel construction, or would this be a legitimate way to attempt to figure out who was involved in the Silk Road, and is it plausibly the way the FBI might have zeroed in on the server?
parallel construction is retroactively finding an alternate, legal/unclassified explanation for an evidence trail, but one which is inherently incorrect; if the ssl cert scanning or other repeatable method was the route taken, nsa probably wouldn't want to tip their hand. it's probably worth noting that the only examples of parallel construction that we have confirmation of were drug cases
Yes I know what it is, but what I'm curious about is would that tactic fit the definition. Scanning IP addresses for publicly served SSL certs and comparing them with one served over TOR isn't obviously an unwarranted search is it?
If the original TOR cert was discovered in an unlawful search, and then they did a scan of the public internet to find it again in a legal search, that's parallel construction.
And let's not forget: NSA already have an almost-irresistibly useful database designed for exactly this purpose (selecting and correlating on attributes of SIGINT-captured SSL/TLS sessions, such as certificates - and they could easily just put a selector on the CommonName or the certificate fingerprint).
You don't have to be the NSA to make a database like that, but it helps. I could build a database broadly like that for certificates/ciphersuites/other metadata myself with active scanning and zmap (and it might make a good weekend project, to examine and contrast RC4 proliferation amongst TLS-encrypted web and mail servers) - but they have a near-realtime-updating passively-constructed one. If the FBI asked them for help, they'd definitely use that.
It's hard enough to explain this kind of stuff to one intelligent businessperson--there's just so much background knowledge that goes into understanding this. Explaining this to 12 jurors, half of whom will likely be of below average intelligence, is a pretty much impossible task. Sadly I think this case will be won on the charisma of the lawyers rather than facts which will go over most jurors' heads.
Note that in one of his talks Morgan Marquis-Boire said he had to change IP some times because he was blocked generating too much traffic while scanning.
But he managed to map a lot of secret Trojan servers used by govs.
If you scroll down past all the photos of chilli peppers, this guy was posting interesting things he found during the VNC scan: https://twitter.com/viss/media
(Would be nice if there was a gallery, as infinite scrolling uses a ton of browser memory, but I'm not aware of one...)
before the mods changed the link. Here's a vote for changing the HN code so it says "link changed from $X to $Y" at the top of the page when they do that.
Isn't it contempt of court to bear false witness; don't people caught doing that get charged and put in prison? So, which person was in the witness stand and will USA prove to be a democratic nation under the rule-of-law and charge them?
The government (executive) lies to other branches of the government (judiciary) with impunity. Once in a while, a judge will get angry about it, but prosecutors and expert witnesses issue whopping lies into the official record every day.
Aren't USA judges voted in? Why do the people vote for judges that will sit quiet whilst someone provably lies in court?
We found them by simple looking at the IP that the packets of the captcha were served from. The captcha was served over tor, based on the evidence that's impossible. Either you lied or you need to add further evidence. If you can't/won't add further evidence then as the court sees it you lied and are in contempt and will be punished in line with minimum sentencing??
This is of the order of a "he robbed me at home at exactly 2pm", "your submitted cell-phone evidence says you were at work from 1pm until 4pm".
If the defendant is convicted on some other counts can they, or anyone else, do anything or is the allowance of officers of the FBI to lie in open court somehow embedded in the USA constitution.
As a foreigner to the USA this sort of thing just undermines the entire foreign policy rhetoric of bringing democracy to the world. Bring some damned democracy to the USA first: government by the people for the people, my arse.
Any time you have two opposite sides in court, one says yes the other says no, one of them is lying. So, in addition to a regular guilty / not-guilty verdict, do you want to also see an automatic contempt of court verdict for the losing party?
If they provably and knowingly lied it seems reasonable. Here there seems like ~0% chance that the FBI expert in computer forensics (which they'd need to be to be running such an investigation, surely) can't possibly know that he's not lying?
If you can't tell the truth in court then keep your mouth shut or you'll be punished accordingly seems like the exact message a country intending to operate under the rule-of-law should be promoting.
This case is being heard by a federal court, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Federal judges are appointed by the president with the consent of the Senate.
Someone else can correct me if I'm wrong, but judges are not voted in. At least, I know that supreme court justices are not and I assume other positions are done the same way. US judges are elected by politicians (Supreme Court justices being elected by the president, although Congress can veto that decision).
Why do the people vote for judges that will sit quiet whilst someone provably lies in court?
Most voters don't have information about such incidents or enough time to crawl through court records looking for that information. Actually, in judicial elections, most voters don't even have anyone else to vote for.
Some judges are appointed, some are elected. AFAIK (IANAL/YMMV) appointment is more common at the state and federal levels, while elections are more common at county and municipal levels.
IMO electing judges and sheriffs makes negative sense, but that's what we have going on here.
I wish they'd have made the FBI's story a little more believable. I mean, it seems slightly more legitimate than what you see on TV and movies about hacking.
I don't do forensics. But I am a reverse-engineer and I am familiar with the techniques: more familiar than Tarbell, it seems. (That's really his name? Tarballs from Tarbell? My goodness.) Tarbell's declaration reads to me more like a textbook demonstration of (bad) parallel construction in action.
They could have done it legitimately, without compromising the server and potentially tainting the evidence any way they wanted: DPR indeed made a few rookie mistakes that would potentially provide for that. But the logs don't seem to actually have evidence supporting that, which is very unusual and at this time not explained? The declarations filed so far do not really seem to support that either, which is very odd and strongly suggests that we don't have the whole picture here: and we really should.
(Of course, we don't have the whole image, so we don't have the whole picture here. BTW: They used tar, not dd or ddfldd? Boo.)
Seriously how is this constructive? We let people up vote and comment on an article and then swap it out to something else leaving all the comments and up votes?
This seems like a mistake. The original posted article wasn't blogspam. It commented on the krebs article. Adding detailed commentary to a source has a long and valid history.
Maybe we could have a whitelist, where non-blogspam blogs get a 'pass' on being edited. In this case, the Errata Sec blog provides much more value than some crappy blog spam and stands on it own. (Errata sec provides a desired value-add, you might say.)
I don't know why you (HN administration) need to do these URL switches. Isn't their room on the internet to add a line "Editor (dang): original source appears to be https://example.com/original-source" and let people decide for themselves which source to use whilst maintaining the context for the discussion?
I am a foremost Internet expert on this sort of thing..........As an expert in such topics as sniffing passwords.........As an expert, I know the Tarbell declaration is gibberish. As an expert reading the configuration and logs........
Arguments from authority might be a bad thing on internet fora where everyone is assumed to have infinite time (and ability) to dig into details. In society as a whole, and especially in the courts, however, these arguments are a useful short-cut.
It may help to rewrite those in your head to, "as an experienced systems administrator who knows how these particular config files work" or perhaps "how config files work in general".
These are all questions of basic fact and they are all easily testable.
What do courts do when this situation comes up? Do they play warring experts, when (at least) one side definitely wants to perform a test, because they are confident that their interpretation is correct?
(ed: 'questions of basic fact' like, whether a server with this configuration is hittable from non-allowed IPs)
As for the backend servers - if all machines are connected through OpenVPN with TLS-Auth they can use private IP space and are not accessible from outside. The OpenVPN tunnels are configured outside of the onion VM and Tor VM and the backend machines are also in a VM that pipes all outgoing traffic (except OpenVPN traffic) to the internet through Tor.
This setup should at least omit the problem of leaking public IP addresses on compromise or did I overlook something? Let's ignore VM outbreak exploits (ksplice/unattenend-upgrades should help here if it's not the NSA).
With TLS-Auth and a default DROP firewall rule all machines should not even appear in scans on the internet. So any outside contact to any machines is only possible if you know the OpenVPN TLS-Key + Certificates. An intruder would only see local IP addresses even if he manages to compromise a backend server. All created outgoing traffic to find the machines would be routed through Tor.
As the Tor onion VM is separate from the webserver only a Tor remote exploit or a VM outbreak exploit would be critical. Maybe encryption can help here.
Another point is using dedicated hardware with Full Disk Encryption and just enter the passphrase via the provider console. There are cold boot attacks but VPS servers allow to dump a memory image while running - that's not so easy with dedicated hardware.