The project this month was to set up a website on a Raspberry Pi3 and then put that website on the “Dark Web”. The project creates the website content using Joomla and adds other functionality that likely makes care and feeding easier.
I’m still working on my version of this project and will soon have an .Onion site up and visible (so to speak). Below is what we discussed at the meeting plus some materials I promised to include.
Resources discussed at the meeting
“Host your own free .onion website using Raspbian on RPi3” from hackster.io. Made by Alex Gulyas, this is rated an intermediate project. The project uses another project “Raspbian Jessie with Joomla, Owncloud”, made by Alex Gulyas, to install the basic components – Apache, PHP, etc.
How I modified the project
Rather than install Joomla, I substituted GetSimple CMS, a really simple CMS that uses XML as the storage media. This eliminates the need for MySQL and PHPmyadmin. OwnCloud could be useful, but I did not install it. Instead I installed SaMBa with security set so it is accessible only from other machines on my network.
Here are more things I found helpful and/or interesting
Wikipedia articles
Websites and Articles
- Onion Routing – explains many things you didn’t ask yet
- It’s About To Get Even Easier to Hide on the Dark Web
So you have TOR, now what?
Tools
- A “Google” for Tor – Grams (http://grams7enufi7jmdl.onion/)
- DuckDuckGo Onion (http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/)
- The best VPNs 2017
Books
- The dark net : inside the digital underworld by Jamie Bartlett (Melville House, 2015) [Really, really good. Less about the technology, more about the people and sites that inhabit the dark web.]
- Tor and the Dark Art of Anonymity: How to Be Invisible from NSA Spying by Lance Henderson (Independent Publishing Platform (2015) [far less good]
Hints gathered along the way
- For the obsessively paranoid: do all your Internet activity using a VPN to mask your location and real IP address. Start TOR only after the VPN is running and carrying all of your traffic. The VPN will encrypt your packets between you and the TOR entry point.
- Never open an Office document, or any other file that could contain links or executable content (like pictures, etc.), that you have downloaded using TOR while you are still connected to the Internet in any way. Content in the document could give away your real IP by connecting to the Internet outside of TOR.
See the project running on an actual Pi
While I work out the final details of installing both an SSL certificate and the Onion site configuration, the project website is available here. You’ll not that the content looks remarkably like this page. The .onion URL will be posted here when that’s ready.