david wong

Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity and the author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a crypto architect at O(1) Labs (working on the Mina cryptocurrency), before that I was the security lead for Diem (formerly Libra) at Novi (Facebook), and a security consultant for the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. This is my blog about cryptography and security and other related topics that I find interesting.

Silk Road caught, Tor compromised? posted October 2013

Silk Road and its owner have just http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/02/crime-silkroad-raid-idUSL1N0HS12C20131002" target="_blank">got caught by the FBI. If you didn't know, silk road (an illegal drug market) was hosted on the Tor network as an onion website, which was suppose to grant him total anonymity. Apparently the catch was made from a stupid human mistake :

1) Located the first reference to "silk road" on the internet. You can find this yourself on Google: "silk road" site:shroomery.org Date range: Jan 1,2011 - Jan 31,2011 * 2) The same username, "altoid", showed up on a bitcointalk days later. 3) Later in 2011 "altoid" made a post on bitcointalk with his email address, containing his real name, in it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47811.msg568744#msg5... If you search the name on Google it doesn't show up, but if you look at the user's page you can see it in his posts.

But some are skeptical, and many seems to think it could have been http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-nsa-users-online-anonymity" target="_blank">the NSA getting into the Tor Network. What do you think?

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