The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines • Hacker News Board

Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

#51

Post by nacs » Mon, Sep 22, 2014, 12:57 AM UTC

RyanZAG wrote: post #15

drsintoma wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are more expensive, but they are usually easy and immediate to acquire. Which makes provisioning much more efficient in case of fluctuating traffic. And overall sysadmins will have less tendency to over-provision, meaning getting more and beefier machines than it's needed "to be safe".

From the article it sounds like they aren't provisioning for fluctuating traffic and have a fixed set of VMs. Most providers can get you hardware within a couple hours in any case.

Their historical traffic records are probably good enough to predict how much traffic will be coming in during the different times of the year and they could ramp up or scale down the number of VMs as needed possibly saving them some money.

Also VPS provisioning time is seconds/minutes instead of hours to where they could redeploy to another provider if they suddenly got the boot from one provider. And via Amazon/Digitalocean-type APIs this reprovisioning-on-failure could be fully automated.

Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

#52

Post by no_future » Mon, Sep 22, 2014, 1:09 AM UTC

fooyc wrote: post #29

droopyEyelids wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think TPB specifically might save money: 1) Hardware seizure expenses vs LEOs duplicating the hdd of a virt. 2) TPB needs to locate in disparate jurisdictions to take advantages of different legal situations. That would involve a ton of shipping costs, probably more lost hardware, and paying for remote hands 3) They had been paying a premium for 'bulletproof' hosting.

Renting a dedicated server doesn't involve any of this. There are dedicated server providers in every part of the world, including MPAA-proof countries.

There are almost no MPAA-proof countries, its pretty hard to hide from billion dollar companies with lobbyists and legal teams who are effectively above the law/make the laws. Countries that do ignore international copyright laws(Russia, China, Iran, pretty much any South American country) are usually very expensive to get a dedicated server in and have unreliable networks and piss-poor speeds. On top of that they have their own set of content laws(Russia and China censor anything that they perceive as against their government and jail/execute those who create and facilitate its distribution, good luck hosting anything in a muslim country that opposes Islam see:pretty much anything fun).

Sweden and Holland used to be considered anti-copyright havens, but the movie/recording industry mafia eventually pressured them into passing legislation that squashed this.

The only countries where you could operate in and be reasonably copyright resistant are Iceland and Switzerland, because they are non-EU members and have great data protection laws as of now. Dedicated servers there are quite overpriced though.

Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

#53

Post by dwild » Mon, Sep 22, 2014, 2:50 PM UTC

dlgeek wrote: post #37

tacotime wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how long until our nation's SWAT teams are equipped with ram rippers and cans of liquid nitrogen.

No need to get that fancy. If they're in the cloud, they're most likely on Xen, which natively supports full memory dumps. LE goes to the cloud provider with a warrant, they run "sudo xm dump-core", LE walks away with a memory dump without the client ever knowing anything.

Even if they are able to do that, they still need to shutdown 21 other VM, probably on 21 other hosting provider in different countries, all that in the same time. I'm sure they can but I'm also pretty sure TPB can start new ones faster then authorities can stop them.

Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

#54

Post by KMag » Mon, Sep 22, 2014, 7:39 PM UTC

aianus wrote: post #48

KMag wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with homomorphic encryption in this case is that you need access to the private key in order to interpret the results of the computation. Joe Public encrypts queries using a public key, and the query runs on a possibly compromised server without the attackers learning anything about the database or the query, but then the result of the query looks like absolute gibberish to Joe Public. Giving Joe Public a…

> Giving Joe Public access to the private key necessary for interpreting the query result allows attackers to inspect all of the intermediate states of the query finite state machine, which allows debugging and inspection just as if homomorphic encryption wasn't in use. This doesn't apply to TPB, but one could give each user of, say, an email webapp the private key to his/her own data while still facilitating server-…

> In a homomorphic encryption scheme that supported querying, only the encrypted results would need to be relayed back from each search shard, no?

Yes, but as I stated originally, the size of the result is the size of the finite state machine which encodes all of the query data plus the search mechanics. We may in the future discover ways around this, but it's a limitation of the current state of the art.

Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

#55

Post by KMag » Mon, Sep 22, 2014, 7:53 PM UTC

TheLoneWolfling wrote: post #49

KMag wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with homomorphic encryption in this case is that you need access to the private key in order to interpret the results of the computation. Joe Public encrypts queries using a public key, and the query runs on a possibly compromised server without the attackers learning anything about the database or the query, but then the result of the query looks like absolute gibberish to Joe Public. Giving Joe Public a…

So you're saying that, effectively, anything that Joe Public can request an adversary can request, so that by giving Joe Public access to the database you'd be giving an adversary the same access?

No. You're over-simplifying what I said and arriving at a trivial statement. I suppose I would correct your summary to be "The mechanics of current homomorphic encryption mean that by giving Joe Public _ONE_KIND_ of access to the database you'd be giving an adversary _ANOTHER_, _MORE_POWERFUL_ kind of access to the same database."

I'm responding to the GP, who was hoping that homomorphic encryption would allow TPB to hand an attacker a working copy of the database on which the attacker could run queries, but not leak information about what the database was doing.

I'm making the statement that allowing Joe Public the ability to interpret query results allows the attacker the ability to observe the database's internal state at each step of the query, nullifying any advantages of homomorphic encryption.

I explained why current homomorphic encryption doesn't allow the kind of separation of access the GP was hoping for, and outlined one way a theoretical discovery advancing the state of the art might allow what the GP was hoping for.