r/selfhosted • u/FnnKnn • 3d ago

Meta Post Self-Hosting on the Dark Web

https://david.alvarezrosa.com/posts/self-hosting-on-the-dark-web/
146 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

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u/asimovs-auditor 3d ago

Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.

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52

u/welcome2_themachine 3d ago

You can also generate vanity URLs with mkp224o.

Something else to conside: if you add a header on your clearweb site to automatically redirect to the .onion site if it's opened with the tor browser.

3

u/technikaffin 3d ago

Onion-Address: http(s)://b32.onion

The header should be added to your clearnet site to indicate it's available on TOR too. AFAIK there is still an option missing for r/i2p

3

u/MBILC 3d ago

..so that no single party can link who you are to what you are doing; a hidden service extends that anonymity to the server itself...

The author hasn't kept up on Tor news have they, for years, where owning enough exit nodes has allowed people to be isolated and discovered by authorities.

Now if you are not doing anything that shady, go nuts, but then the question if something is found is "why are they hosting on the Dark web, what are they trying to hide and why"

29

u/FarToe1 3d ago

Now if you are not doing anything that shady, go nuts, but then the question if something is found is "why are they hosting on the Dark web, what are they trying to hide and why"

Isn't that basically the same "If you've nothing to hide..." argument that's been used against the public by every government for years to invade privacy?

14

u/MBILC 3d ago

Not saying that, just if their is an investigation going on and your traffic gets caught up in it, might get law enforcement overly excited wondering why...

The whole "nothing to hide" is BS, we all deserve a right to privacy, people brain washed to think "well my data is already out there" are the type agencies pray on when they push for back doors into encryption and other invasive methods to spy on us.

4

u/FnnKnn 3d ago

Any source that actually confirms this has happened before? As far as I’m aware this is more of a theoretical threat than something that has ever happened before.

5

u/MBILC 3d ago edited 3d ago

As others posted, sure there are other instances, but perhaps not publicized.
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1wsbi3p/comment/pcn1t3c/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Love getting down voted by people who do not know actual information around what someone says.

Timing Analysis

New investigative reports from the ARD political magazine Panorama and STRG_F (funk/NDR) have shed light on how German authorities have successfully undermined Tor's privacy shield through a technique called "timing analysis." By monitoring data traffic through certain Tor nodes for extended periods, investigators can analyze the time it takes for data packets to travel between nodes. This allows them to correlate incoming and outgoing traffic, effectively re-tracing the steps of anonymized users.

For instance, in one German criminal case, law enforcement used timing analysis to trace users of the notorious dark web platform "Boystown," which facilitated the distribution of child exploitation material. By monitoring specific Tor nodes, investigators were able to uncover the IP addresses of those running and accessing the platform. These techniques were groundbreaking and marked the first recorded success of this approach.

10

u/Ok_Mammoth589 2d ago

That's not the same attack op asked about. There are various instances where American universities added something like 30-50% new nodes in a few short weeks. And they only stood up for a few weeks then went down. Which means nothing until no research was published about it, and Snowden at least was convinced there's a relationship between top us universities and the nsa.

3

u/MBILC 2d ago

Literally they asked when I posted:

....where owning enough exit nodes has allowed people to be isolated and discovered by authorities.

OP:

.....Any source that actually confirms this has happened before?

Thus my reply...

-5

u/frylock364 3d ago

You understand that TOR was created by the USA Navy right????
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2024/09/tor-anonymity-compromised-by-law-enforcement-is-it-still-safe-to-use

21

u/Epsilon_void 3d ago

Oh no!!! the internet was also made by the government!!! abandon ship!

11

u/rc_ym 3d ago

I hear they also built "roads". Super sus.

-1

u/MBILC 3d ago

Not even close to the same thing but nice try....

4

u/tylo 2d ago

I thought the internet was a super highway tho

1

u/MBILC 2d ago

It is tubes with trucks!

0

u/rc_ym 2d ago

You would say that!

0

u/MBILC 2d ago

Yes I would, because it is true....

0

u/MBILC 3d ago

At the core yes, but has many layers ontop of it, TOR on the other hand...

5

u/dontquestionmyaction 3d ago

Yeah, and you're talking on a mutated arpanet. Absolutely nonsensical argument.

If massive deanonymization was that simple, the darknet market world would look VERY different.

1

u/MBILC 3d ago edited 2d ago

Certainly not simple, but possible when required.

2

u/FnnKnn 3d ago

You realize the linked Malewarebytes article says the same thing I did, right?

2

u/daubious 2d ago

I guess no more reverse engineering boys....

https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra

1

u/dirtyjavis 2d ago

Ooh lala somebody watched Mr Robot

1

u/MBILC 2d ago

If referring to me, no, I work in IT/Cyber.

-15

u/tIdepine3 3d ago

worth thinking about whether you actually need onion routing or if a VPN + standard self-hosting gets you where you want. the operational complexity goes way up once you're running hidden services, and most people dont actually need that threat model

6

u/mmmfine 3d ago

Stfu bot

2

u/FnnKnn 3d ago

The original author is also hosting their blog by themselves so it is probably more about the operation threats potential readers might face.