David Wong

cryptologie.net

cryptography, security, and random thoughts

Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity, research advisor at Archetype, and author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a cryptography architect of Mina at O(1) Labs, the security lead for Libra/Diem at Facebook, and a security engineer at the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. Welcome to my blog about cryptography, security, and other related topics.

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Silk Road caught, Tor compromised?

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Silk Road and its owner have just 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 the NSA getting into the Tor Network. What do you think?

← back to all posts blog • 2013-10-12
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Silk Road caught, Tor compromised?
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