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.
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.
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
[…]
> Be able to boot them back on without physical access (perhaps this is simply a Bad Idea?)
This is exactly the problem which our project solves:
http://www.recompile.se/mandos
Introduction:
http://www.recompile.se/mandos/man/intro.8mandos
Summary:
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.
You also need to adjust the “approval_delay” setting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KVM_switch#KVM_over_IP_.28IPKV...
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.
---
[1] There are a number of drugs less harmful than alcohol & tobacco (I.e. less harmful than drugs already sanctioned): http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus...
[2] The Economics Behind the U.S. Government's Unwinnable War on Drugs http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2013/Powelldrugs.htm...
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.
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.
Identify theft and hacking tools are both pretty (a|im)moral, though.
I dont think anyone is. Rather, the moralists are making an example out of him to further their own cause.
Take a look into the dirty underside of the distribution (of legal goods) industry and you will find intimidation and violence used.
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 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.
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.
Edit: autocorrect
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!
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.
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.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/27-psychological-reasons-why-...
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.
> 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.
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?
Please, sir or madam, do not tax the hivemind.
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.
I think this is a precursor to a lot of drug use in the U.S. We see, we panic, we cope. (Ok, I am painting with a rather broad brush this morning...)
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.
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.
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.
Please see: 1st Amendment to the US Constitution.
Not that we honor our constitution anymore.
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.