‘Silk Road Reloaded’ Adopts I2P Anonymous Network and Darkcoins

  • 12 January 2015
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David Bisson  Jan 12, 2015
 
‘Silk Road Reloaded,’ a new anonymous online drug market, draws upon a host of new anonymizing features, including I2P connectivity and the use of cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin.
 
By embracing I2P, the administrators of the new Silk Road iteration now welcome a service that, as opposed to Tor, is friendly to peer-to-peer connections and uses a design that is optimized for hidden services.
 
There are other differences between Tor and I2P, as well. As the I2P site explains, “The two primary differences between Tor / Onion-Routing and I2P are again related to differences in the threat model and the out-proxy design (though Tor supports hidden services as well). In addition, Tor takes the directory-based approach – providing a centralized point to manage the overall ‘view’ of the network, as well as gather and report statistics, as opposed to I2P’s distributed network database and peer selection.”
 
Silk Road Reloaded has also adopted the Darkcoin, an alternative cryptocurrency that claims to keep its users’ transactions for more private than Bitcoin.
 
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Designed to make analysis attacks harder, I2P is built for hidden services.

by Sean Gallagher - Jan 13 2015
 
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Gatchina_palace._Secret_Tunnel-640x480.jpg Silk Road Reloaded is using a different sort of secret tunnel to smuggle digital transactions of illicit wares: the I2P anonymizing network.TatyanaTor is apparently no longer a safe place to run a marketplace for illegal goods and services. With the alleged operator of the original Silk Road marketplace, Ross Ulbricht, now going to trial, the arrest of his alleged successor and a number of others in a joint US-European law enforcement operation, and the seizure of dozens of servers that hosted "hidden services" on the anonymizing network, the operators of the latest iteration of Silk Road have packed their tents and moved to a new territory: the previously low-profile I2P anonymizing network.
 
On the surface, I2P (which originally was an acronym for "Invisible Internet Project") is similar in many ways to the Tor Project's anonymizing service. Like Tor, I2P encapsulates and anonymizes communications over the Internet, passing Web requests and other communications through a series of proxies to conceal the location and identity of the user. Like Tor, I2P also allows for the configuration of websites within the network that are concealed from the Internet at large. Called "eepsites," these equivalents to Tor's hidden services can only be reached by using the anonymizing network or a portal site that connects to the I2P proxy network.
 
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The following article is a update:

5 technologies that betrayed Silk Road leader's anonymity.

By Joab Jackson
 
Pro tip for any would-be online drug kingpins: Don't post vacation pictures on Facebook.
Ross Ulbricht was convicted in federal court in Manhattan last week for his role operating the Silk Road online marketplace. He could serve 30 years or more behind bars.
The market Ulbricht built was based on an expectation of anonymity: Silk Road servers operated within an anonymous Tor network. Transactions between buyers and sellers were conducted in bitcoin. Everything was supposedly untraceable, yet prosecutors presented a wealth of digital evidence to convince the jury that Ulbricht was Dread Pirate Roberts, the handle used by the chief operator of the site.
How was Ulbricht nabbed? At least some of the blame can be placed on what seems like misplaced trust in a handful of technologies Ulbricht thought would shield his identity. These are five that tripped him up.
 
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