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SILK ROAD – ANONYMOUS DEEP WEB MARKETPLACE April 2013 Cara Bloom NOTE Since this paper has been written Silk Road founder and admin Dread Pirate Roberts has been revealed to be San Franciscan Ross Ulbricht, the site has been shut down twice and the current iteration Silk Road 3.0 is running similarly to the version discussed in this paper, the original Silk Road 1.0. Millions in Bitcoins have been confiscated by the FBI and dozens of admins and sellers have been arrested. All of these recent events will have caused changes to the site’s infrastructure and user culture that are not discussed in the following paper. ABSTRACT The Silk Road is an anonymous marketplace for contraband that can only be accessed through the Deep Web and functions through implementation careful security measures including the use of Bitcoins as its only currency. Buyers and sellers create trust the site by rating one another and the site supports a trusting environment with an escrow system to hedge transactions. Users can also interact in a separate forum where Silk Road culture can be seen. Though the site has received mixed reactions from the media these articles have caused the site to grow. Many governments have targeted the Silk Road and attacks have been made against it. Throughout, the marketplace has continued to expand and increase its security measures, making it the most popular online market for drugs. THE DEEP WEB Commercial anonymity has been revolutionized by the web. In years past to make a transaction there had to be face-to-face contact between the customer and the seller, while modern consumers can purchase almost anything online without any human interaction. For most transactions the Internet simplifies the process, but with purchases that could embarrass the buyer or even put them in jail, online anonymity has transformed the process remarkably. To make an illicit transaction ten years ago the consumer would have to know a guy who knows a guy who knows a dealer who knows a supplier. The initial contact relays the order to his connection and so on through the chain to a supplier. If one node was busted the whole network could be exposed. Finding trustworthy contacts who have the needed connections to purchase contraband is very difficult without ubiquitous Internet use. There are no references or listings in the phone book so without Google search word of mouth is the obvious, if inefficient and unsafe, way to share information. Online networks can be dissected similar to physical networks. To make a transaction the buyer’s computer must send a packets through a network of routers to fetch information from the website. Law enforcement can trace this path from the computer to the router nodes to the website and back. This is why Tor was invented. Tor – or the Onion Router – takes requests for webpages and passes them on to other onion routers until one of them fetches the page, passing it through the layers of routers back to the computer that requested it. The difference between normal computing and Tor is encryption: all traffic on Tor routers is virtually untraceable SILK ROAD | 2 and part of the unsearchable part of the Internet called the Deep Web. This is the part of the web that cannot be indexed by standard search engines like the Surface Web. Tor can bypass a high school’s proxy list or the Great Firewall of China, making it perfect for all kinds of embarrassing or illegal online activity. The Farmer’s Market, one of the first online drug markets to operate in the Deep Web, was taken down by operation “Adam Bomb” and its eight admins were arrested because its security was not robust enough to protect it. The DEA acknowledged the Silk Road and began an investigation in 2011. When asked this year if he was worried Dread Pirate Roberts (the Silk Road’s admin and founder) said, “No. I have confidence in our security measures.” SITE ARCHITECTURE The Silk Road uses a basic ecommerce web design with different product categories, pictures of top items, and account information shown in the user’s national currency or in Bitcoins, the crypto-currency used on the site. SILK ROAD | 3 Traffic statistics * Registered users can access their inbox, orders, Total population 100,000 shopping cart and account using the top navigation Active population 20,000 bar. Similarly sellers can access these options as Male:female ratio 4:1 well as their listings. Account balances can be shown New users /day 100 Page views /day 100,000 in dollars or in Bitcoins, the currency used on the site. Sales statistics * Estimated sales $22,000,000 A small news button shows recent posts by Estimated profit $2,000,000 libertarian founder Dread Pirate Roberts and a Profit/Sales 9.1% small icon of the character he named himself after with a hyperlink to his statement. This includes the Operator commission schedule Silk Road’s purpose, rules, and advice on how to First $50 10% utilize the site to its fullest. One of his most $51 - 150 8.5% appropriate comments is that “the old saying, ‘with $151 - 300 6% freedom comes responsibility’ could not be more $301 - 500 3% true here.” $501 - 1000 2% Over $1000 1.5% User feedbacK ratings SELLERS 5/5 96.5% 4/5 1.3% Because of the inherent anonymity of the Silk Road, 3/5 0.8% it is difficult to aggregate information on the users of 2/5 0.3% 1/5 1.1% the site. Based on the shipping origins, it can be estimated that about 40% of sellers are in the Top 5 shipping origins United States, assuming that there are no USA 43.83% appreciable differences between the American and Undeclared 16.29% world-wide seller behaviors. UK 10.15% Netherlands 6.52% Seller accounts are auctioned to Silk Road users to Canada 5.89% deter fake or dishonest sellers. This also discourages sellers to create more than one seller account Top 5 shipping destinations though, surprisingly, does not create sizeable Worldwide 49.67% switching costs as seen in the chart below. USA 35.15% EU 6.19% Canada 6.05% The Silk Road wiki includes a comprehensive UK 3.66% seller’s guide with rules, advice, and how-to’s for sellers. The process is highly customizable: sellers *Approximate can choose whether to link their listings to USD or to BTC, if the whole population can see the listing, and SILK ROAD | 4 whether to hedge the exchange in the Silk Road’s escrow system. If a seller uses dollars to price their items and hedges the transactions with escrow, they protect themselves from fluctuations in the Bitcoin rate. The Bitcoin rate can have sizable Probability a seller will continue publicly selling fluctuations over a few hours so sellers on the site. About half the sellers leave within 100 need to safeguard their prices both during days and one-fifth leave within 3 weeks. Christin, the time a product is listed and the time 2012 between the transaction and its delivery. By using USD instead of BTC to price goods, sellers will always get the amount of money they have set as a price, no matter the Bitcoin rate that day and hour. hedging with the escrow system assures sellers that if the rate fluctuates after an order is placed but before the payment is made that they will receive the USD amount that the order is worth. As the seller’s guide explains, if order worth 10 BTC is $100 but the BTC rate halves while the order is being filled, the seller will receive 20 BTC from the escrow system. Popular sellers who become overloaded like user TedDanzig SR, the most popular maker of fake identification on the anonymous marketplace, can go in to stealth mode. Sellers were being overloaded by the mass of orders, especially from new users who often had to ask many questions. Stealth mode for an entire user or for a listing allows the page to be accessed directly via its URL to filter out browsing users. It was designed as a temporary measure. The architecture behind seller accounts is all about safety. The crypto, Bitcoins, and Tor ensure anonymity while the link to USD and escrow system ensure that the sellers will not lose money when Bitcoins fluctuate. At the end of the seller’s guide he states: “Regardless of your motivations, you are a revolutionary. Your actions are bringing satisfaction to those that have been oppressed for far too long. Take pride in what you do and stand tall.” SILK ROAD | 5 BUYERS Category # Items Pcnt Weed 3338 13.7% Drugs 2194 9.0% Most of the Silk Road wiki buyer’s guide is focused Prescription 1784 7.3% on purchasing items reliably and anonymously. Benzos 1193 4.9% The admins assume that Silk Road buyers are less Books 955 3.9% tech savvy than sellers, congratulating them in the Cannabis 877 3.6% first section for successfully finding the site Hash 820 3.4% Cocaine 630 2.6% through Tor. The next sections outline basic tasks Pills 473 1.9% essential to the purchasing process such as getting Blotter (LSD) 440 1.8% Bitcoins, using the shopping cart, making Money 405 1.7% payments, and receiving packages. MDMA (ecstasy) 393 1.6% Erotica 385 1.6% Other parts assure buyers that their anonymity Steroids 376 1.5% and money will be safe through use of the escrow Seeds 374 1.5% Heroin 370 1.5% system, good shipping practices, and what DMT 343 1.4% information sellers can see about them.
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