Hiding in the Dark: The Internet You Cannot See Marc Visnick

Goals for Today  What’s the big picture?  Define some terms and concepts  Situate these in the real world

The Internet

 A global network of networks…  Connecting billions of devices...  Using various communications protocols…  To provide a variety of services.

A global network of networks…  Many devices  Servers, clients  Routers  IoT  Many locations  On land  Under the ocean  In orbit

Connected using protocols…  Internet Protocol (IP)  Every device must have a numerical address   Domain Name Service (DNS)  Translates names to numbers  aipla.org =  Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)  Packetizes data, ensures delivery  Routes around blockage

To provide services.  Services run on top of the underlying communications protocols   File sharing (peer-to-peer)  Media streaming  Virtual Private Networking (VPN)  Web browsing

The Internet Visible net Dark net

The World Wide Web  The Mother of all Services  An information space composed of hypertext documents (“resources”), identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs).  Resources usually constructed from HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

How do I find stuff on the Web?  If the Web is the mother of all services, search is the mother of all problems  Search engines attempt to index accessible web content  Searchable content = the surface web

WWWW Surface Web Deep Web

The Deep Web  Not inherently nefarious; simply means:  Non-searchable (by standard search engines)  Most web content, is in fact in the deep  Intranet pages  Paywall-protected services  Dynamically-generated webpages  “Dead” pages which search robots cannot reach  The dark web

The Dark Web (here, there be Dragons…)  Web content found on darknets  Access generally requires specialized software and/or authorization  Characterized by:  Anonymity  Encryption  Decentralization (Peer-to-Peer)  Of Tor and the Silk Road…

Tor  Software to enable anonymous communications  Anonymity, not end-to-end security  Can be used for:  Web browsing (the dark web)  Instant messaging  File transfers  Wide range of users  Not just criminals!

The origins of Tor  Mid-90’s:  United States Naval Research Laboratory and DARPA  Military wanted a way to anonymously use Internet  2004: NRL open-sources Tor, EFF takes over  2006: Tor Project is formed  Tor has been continuously funded by US Government since its inception

Tor… not your ordinary vegetable  “Onion routing”  Communicate data packets by “wrapping” those packets in multiple layers of encryption  Each layer contains address information for a node in a sequence of nodes, ultimately leading from sender to receiver  Main goal is to preserve anonymity  Tor does not provide end-to-end security  It does provide encryption “in the middle”

The “regular” Internet… Alice Bob Router AddressData

Node Exit Node Entry Node Tor: Create the circuit.. Alice Bob Directory Authority

Node Exit Node Entry Node Tor: Build the onion, send the data... Alice Bob Entry node encryption Node encryption Exit node encryption Original data

Rendezvous Point Tor: Hidden services Alice Bob Database of Hidden Services Introduction Point

Of Tor and Dark Markets…  Dark market: A commercial website running on a dark net, such as Tor  Silk Road, one among many dark markets  On Tor, usually as a hidden service  Dark, in the truest sense…  Havens for sale of drugs, stolen credit cards, and a variety of other illicit goods  “Whack-a-mole”  Silk Road  Silk Road 2.0  Silk Road Reloaded

Of rights holders & reality…  Shutting down dark markets is incredibly hard  How do you discover IP address?  What about jurisdiction issues?  Catch transactions once they cross into real world  Mail drops  Crypto currency conversions to fiat currency  Weakness is almost always the user, not the tech  Shut down markets via technical hacks

Marc Visnick