Re: Hidden Services Hosting and DMCA

2010-06-12 Thread Moritz Bartl
Hi Mike,

Thanks for your valuable input. What you are saying implicates that
there might be forces interested in investigating what I am hosting. In
a way, you need to compare it to any ISP hosting illegal content without
knowledge. In the case of hidden services it might be harder to
determine the ISP, in the Internet today it is trivial. Regardless of
that, in the end I am just an ISP. If they put so much work in finding
the source, and the source turns out to be me - as in an ISP -, what
else is there to do other than contacting me? I will do everything I can
to shut down illegal services, not only because I am forced to by law,
but because I feel it is the right thing to do. The hosters I deal with
all agreed to forward abuse to me based on DCMA (or the appropriate
country specific equivalent), and I approached them with a commercial
partnership background.

If I were to defend the idea, I could say that if you tried to find the
source of a hidden service, personal servers with worse/less regular
uptime on a residential line would be much easier to track down.

> Of course, you can try to simply ignore these orders due to the fact
> that you're German and they're not likely to extradite you over them,
> but you'll probably lose your server, and you might have trouble
> entering the US at a later date then.

Sad as it is, if that's what it takes, I'm up to it. My education spans
carefully crafted rights, and if these rights are no longer guaranteed,
I will, I want to, stand up for them. I will never *ignore* any orders,
but I will carefully examine the legal basis of the inquiry. I've been
maintaining a fairly high bandwidth Tor exit for years now, and I know
how to deal with abuse. The worst thing that happened was a murder case
investigation, but it was no problem to clear it up without any
interruptions of my Tor node.

I have contacted enough cooperating ISPs outside the US if that turns
out to be necessary (and I hope to find more through this project). This
specific server at Softlayer is paid for on a monthly basis. I will not
provide decryption keys, and luckily I am not forced to do so. If I
were, I would not consider doing this. I have closely looked at
(somewhat) related incidents in Germany, and all charges have been
dropped for lack of evidence if the respective disks were encrypted, in
all cases.

I feel that this discussion is on the brink of something off topic, but
the implications are something that definitely need to be clarified in
any case, no matter how I decide.

Speaking to the list: I understand that most of you are skeptical about
this venture, and you have all the right to be. You should be. But don't
just give up one me, tell me about it. Especially with the current
political situation, I see a market around Tor, and you should not
misconceive that. Commerce is not all bad.

Moritz
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Re: webdav as hidden service?

2010-06-12 Thread Kyle Williams
Yes, you can use WebDAV as a hidden service.  FYI, Windows also has it's
"Web Client", aka WebDAV, built into most newer windows OS's.

Security Note:  If you're using Windows and shitty browser like Internet
Explorer, then it's possible for your Username, Domain/Workgroup, and
various other little tidbits of information to be leaked out using WebDav.

Best regards,

Kyle

startx wrote:
> hi.
>
> i was wondering if anybody has tried to set up a webdav 
> directory as a hidden service?
>
> on the server site this should be relatively straight forward: 
> webdav is technically nothing else then a http service
> and apache/mod_webdav would handle that probably the same way
> it would handle the vhost for a hidden service.
>
> however, is there any webdav client which could be used for that?
> firefox does afaik not support webdav (at least not on linux)
> and i would have no idea how to torify nautilus (gnome).
>
> or are their other objections why this would not work?
>
> startx
>
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Re: Hidden Services Hosting and DMCA

2010-06-12 Thread Mike Perry
Thus spake Moritz Bartl (t...@wiredwings.com):

> On 12.06.2010 13:13, Marco Bonetti wrote:
> > On 12/giu/2010, at 12.49, Moritz Bartl  wrote:
> >> The barrier to create hidden services is quite high.
> > I'm not too sure about this: you can run hidden services on tor clients
> > which do not relay any traffic for the network.
> > Starting a service is not that difficult: an home flat Internet
> > connection and a low power computer are ideal for a small personal
> > hidden service.
> 
> That machine should be up 24/7, and you still need to maintain (ie.
> update) it.

Actually, the uptime problem is a rather good reason not to
consolidate hidden services with your exit node. An anonymous user on
the I2P network used to run a public intersection attack on I2P router
uptime vs eepsite (hidden service) uptime. It was rather easy to
correlate which I2P nodes were running which services with this data.

Of course, running hidden services in a separate VM might not have the
correlation that using the same Tor process will, but host OS
downtimes will still be correlated. If it is known that you are a
large provider of hidden services, it becomes useful for an adversary
to closely monitor your host OS for downtime to correlate to downtime
of hidden services.


As a related point, you need to be very careful about your opsec when
providing services like this. While US law protects you from
incriminating yourself by revealing your own encryption keys
(probably), it does not protect you from divulging encryption keys of
your users if you have them, nor does it protect you from court orders
requiring you to install monitoring software into your user's systems
to see what they are doing.

Add in the correlation properties for hidden services or other data
that may be available due to knowledge of your hosting setup (think
apache+php versions, etc), and there may be a sufficient level of
cause for such court orders to be binding.

Of course, you can try to simply ignore these orders due to the fact
that you're German and they're not likely to extradite you over them,
but you'll probably lose your server, and you might have trouble
entering the US at a later date then.


-- 
Mike Perry
Mad Computer Scientist
fscked.org evil labs


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Re: Hidden Services Hosting and DMCA

2010-06-12 Thread Moritz Bartl
On 12.06.2010 22:15, Moritz Bartl wrote:
> I sorry you're right.

LOL now that was a typo. :)
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Re: Hidden Services Hosting and DMCA

2010-06-12 Thread Moritz Bartl
Hi Scott,

On 12.06.2010 21:10, Scott Bennett wrote:
>> That machine should be up 24/7, and you still need to maintain (ie.
>> update) it.
>  What a strange thing to say!  How can you credibly claim to know the
> availability requirements for other persons' hidden services?

I sorry you're right. Being not a native speaker, you shouldn't take all
my phrases literally. ;-)
Let me rephrase that: I see a group of people who might to provide
hidden services, but don't have the resources and/or expertise and/or
will to do it all by themselves.

Cheers,
Moritz
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Re: Hidden Services Hosting and DMCA

2010-06-12 Thread Scott Bennett
 On Sat, 12 Jun 2010 13:15:47 +0200 Moritz Bartl 
wrote:
>On 12.06.2010 13:13, Marco Bonetti wrote:
>> On 12/giu/2010, at 12.49, Moritz Bartl  wrote:
>>> The barrier to create hidden services is quite high.
>> I'm not too sure about this: you can run hidden services on tor clients
>> which do not relay any traffic for the network.
>> Starting a service is not that difficult: an home flat Internet
>> connection and a low power computer are ideal for a small personal
>> hidden service.
>
>That machine should be up 24/7, and you still need to maintain (ie.
>update) it.
>
 What a strange thing to say!  How can you credibly claim to know the
availability requirements for other persons' hidden services?


  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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webdav as hidden service?

2010-06-12 Thread startx
hi.

i was wondering if anybody has tried to set up a webdav 
directory as a hidden service?

on the server site this should be relatively straight forward: 
webdav is technically nothing else then a http service
and apache/mod_webdav would handle that probably the same way
it would handle the vhost for a hidden service.

however, is there any webdav client which could be used for that?
firefox does afaik not support webdav (at least not on linux)
and i would have no idea how to torify nautilus (gnome).

or are their other objections why this would not work?

startx

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Re: Hidden Services Hosting and DMCA

2010-06-12 Thread Moritz Bartl
Hi,

On 12.06.2010 13:13, Marco Bonetti wrote:
> On 12/giu/2010, at 12.49, Moritz Bartl  wrote:
>> The barrier to create hidden services is quite high.
> I'm not too sure about this: you can run hidden services on tor clients
> which do not relay any traffic for the network.
> Starting a service is not that difficult: an home flat Internet
> connection and a low power computer are ideal for a small personal
> hidden service.

That machine should be up 24/7, and you still need to maintain (ie.
update) it.

-- 
Moritz Bartl
http://www.torservers.net/
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Re: Hidden Services Hosting and DMCA

2010-06-12 Thread Marco Bonetti

On 12/giu/2010, at 12.49, Moritz Bartl  wrote:

The barrier to create hidden services is quite high.
I'm not too sure about this: you can run hidden services on tor  
clients which do not relay any traffic for the network.
Starting a service is not that difficult: an home flat Internet  
connection and a low power computer are ideal for a small personal  
hidden service.


--
Sent from my iPwn
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Hidden Services Hosting and DMCA

2010-06-12 Thread Moritz Bartl
Hi,

We are currently having a discussion over at torservers.net on whether
it is wise to offer hidden service hosting.
Most people don't have a server, they use free email or pay for cheap
webhosting. The barrier to create hidden services is quite high. I feel
that the Tor network could definitely use an ISP who offers hidden
services hosting. My idea was to use a separate, disk encrypted virtual
machine for hosting hidden services, and only open it towards the Tor
network. Regular, non-anonymous donators should then be able to open
their files towards the Internet, too.

>> If you use that server for other things beside Tor you will have a
>> hard time to explain and argue when abuse requests arrive - in fact
>> you can't.
>> It is quite easy to differentiate between a client (tor-exit) or a
>> server (hosted content) also for authorities.

Thank you. You're right, this has to be investigated further. I don't
think that hosting content - on a logically different machine -
influences the forwarding argument for the Tor nodes.
Also, I don't see how it is "quite easy" for authorities to
differentiate between middle node traffic and hidden services - that's
what they are there for after all.

>> You will not be able to use the response template if you get abuse
>> requests because it does apply for Tor only.

Then it will still apply for the IP addresses of the nodes.

>> [...] "We further recommend that you not keep any potentially illegal
>> files on the same machine you use for Tor, nor use that machine for
>> any illegal purpose. Although no Tor relay in the US has ever been
>> seized, nor any relay operator sued, the future possibility cannot
>> be ruled out.
>> If that happens, you will want your machine to be clean." [...]

The Tor machine will be clean. If I rent a virtual machine, I also don't
know what happens on other VMs, and this is how I interpret this.

I'm not even so sure if DMCA applies for me, a German hoster offering
services, even when using US servers. Internet law isn't easy.

Moritz Bartl
http://www.torservers.net/
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