You get bonus points (though only a few) for guessing that Ulbricht was logged in as “frosty” on that laptop at the time of his arrest. One was for a remote user called “frosty” who was able to connect from a machine also named “frosty.” As it happened, the laptop that law enforcement seized from Ulbricht at the time of his arrest was named “frosty” too.
Was ist torchat full#
In the case of the SIlk Road servers, only two accounts had full administrative privileges. A list of trusted parties is kept in a file on the server, along with their encrypted passkeys. Users can set up ssh hosts such that trusted parties can log in automatically without providing a password. The Silk Road servers were maintained in large part through ssh (Secure Shell), a tool that allows administrators to log into remote machines in a way that the communication is encrypted. At the same moment, Ulbricht posted vacation pictures on Facebook … from Thailand. In a chat with a fellow administrator in February 2012, Dread Pirate Roberts boasted of enjoying a vacation in Thailand.
To make their case that Ulbricht was Dread Pirate Roberts, prosectors looked for times when the actions of Dread Pirate Roberts correlated closely with those of Ulbricht himself. Ulbricht’s Facebook account also helped prosecutors. That allowed the agent to connect Altoid to Ulbricht. Later in 2011, Altoid popped up on the forum again, posting a help-wanted ad for a bitcoin venture and leaving rossulbricht at gmail dot com as the contact address. But another user had quoted Altoid’s message in their own post, and that message was found by an IRS agent with a simple Google search. Ulbricht (or someone else) later deleted the message, perhaps to cover his tracks. To get people interested in the the new site in January 2011, Ulbricht posted a message on the forum, under the username Altoid, asking if anyone had tried the site. Ulbricht sowed the seeds of his demise the very first time he publicized the Silk Road. Law enforcement had only to verify that the messages, many of them incriminating, came from Dread Pirate Roberts, by using the public key found on the laptop. On Ulbricht’s computer, in a folder marked “keys,” were the private keys used to sign Dread Pirate Roberts’ messages. A public key allows someone to verify that a message comes from the person who claims to have sent it. Ulbricht had affixed Dread Pirate Roberts’ public encryption key to an untold number of Silk Road-related emails and forum posts. In the end, encryption did as much to betray Dread Pirate Roberts’ identity as to protect it. In example after example, the prosecution pointed to logs where the laptop user identified himself as Dread Pirate Roberts. It provides an encrypted communication channel between two parties, using a Tor network to obscure the connection between them.Īlthough TorChat promises encrypted messaging, Ulbricht chose to save the logs in plain text on his computer, creating a trove of conversations with fellow Silk Road administrators.
Was ist torchat software#
Internal communication was carried out mostly through free software called TorChat. Thousands of pages of chat logs helped prosecutors trace the growth of Silk Road.
Ulbricht either didn’t use the tumbler, or if he did, it didn’t help. Silk Road offered a service, called a tumbler, that passed bitcoins through several intermediate wallets to obscure their origin and destination. In Silk Road’s case, prosecutors found it relatively trivial to track profits from Silk Road as they were transferred from wallets used by the online market to wallets on Ulbricht’s laptop. This case showed that all law enforcement needs to do is locate the wallets on each side of a transaction and follow the money. But unlike cash, a detailed public ledger called the blockchain keeps track of each wallet a bitcoin passes through. Like cash, bitcoins aren’t tied to a person’s identity. If you assume your bitcoins can’t be traced back to you, think again.
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