The Silk Road, Drugs on the Dark Web
Before I start with this, I’m going to admit that I suck at writing and wouldn’t possibly be able to give the article the respect it deserves. I simply found it so interesting and was able to make many connections with the material in class. I really suggest the reads below.
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-2/
Anyways…
Ranging from the “onion” routing encryption shells used in Tor to the hierarchy set up by Ross Ulbricht, the whole essence of setting up a covert drug trafficking network on the dark web and having the feds attempt and finally unearth the structure reveals how rife networks of multiple forms are in the idea. Launched February of 2011, the online service allowed users to anonymously send and receive drugs through the exchange of bitcoins in an intensively encrypted path through a network of randomly chosen servers. In October of 2013, after countless hours of data combing and network analysis, law enforcement was able to pinpoint the exact location of the Silk Road’s main server as well as the owner and arrest him in a very smooth and tactical display of deceit and celerity. On February 4th 2015, Ross was convicted of all his charges and sentenced life in jail.
In The Silk Road, in order to safely run his site while still being able to administrate it, Ross or Dread Pirates Roberts (DPR) obviously had to maintain some sort of anonymity in his communications with other people. However, none of his anonymity as DPR could have prevented law enforcement from being able to correlate his communications with other people through non-dark net ip’s with that of developments in the Silk Road. For example, after the initial capture of the Silk Road’s server, the feds were able to observe the code of the website and source fragments of the code to a user from stackoverflow.com who had initially asked how to do those sort of things. Essentially, by creating a network of possible code fragments, the feds were able to link certain parts of the code to a user who had requested help on them a few years earlier. Being able to narrow the suspects down to just a few, during the early years of the site, the feds had discovered many archived posts of a user by the name of “Altoid” who had claimed to have recently discovered a site. Naturally being the first people to have used the site (Altoid was DPR in disguise), the user was clearly to have released one of the first instances of the knowledge behind the existence of the Silk Road, and hence the first “bridge” between the mass of people who did not know about the site and the site itself. With access to the server itself, the feds once again were able to narrow down the list of potential people, this time geographically, by graphically organizing the servers and the connections that they had with other servers. Through numerous iterations of the graphs, law enforcement was able to discover a particular node (aptly named “mastermind”) that was connected to every other node in the network. As the center of this moderately sized network, it was clear to the feds that this must have been the sysadmin, and with this data they were not only able to precisely identify Ross Ulbricht as Dread Pirates Roberts but also pinpoint the location of himself too. Without the tools of network analysis, law enforcement would have been hopeless in trying to discover the identity of DPR.