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

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.

This is clearly the ideal setup for most use cases, and I'm somewhat puzzled as to why it's not more common. I guess using only virtual servers is a tiny bit simpler, so companies will just eat the extra cost.

In an ideal world yes. Or if your software works already seamlessly cross-datacenter. But in the real world is rare that your hosting provider is good at both VMs and metal. At least that's the biggest problem I've always encountered, specially with budget providers.

You need CyberBunker if you need your host to protect you.

If you have 20 servers in 20 different providers, who don't know who they are hosting, you don't need this.

What's the MPAA proof country? The US has a lot of influence, and they've very obviously pressured other countries into action against TPB.

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.

Homomorphic encryption isn't fast enough... yet. But it's getting faster!

It will be amazing if/when we get to the point where you can have a virtual server where you know that the person with physical access to the server cannot access your data.

Even if it is two orders of magnitude slower than raw hardware that's still fast enough for some things. (For example, being able to have a username+password -> personal info database safely run on someone else's hardware.) And once it takes off there probably will start to be hardware support/accelerators for it - like vector intrinsics and AES instructions currently.

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 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.

I suppose the routing proxy could hold the private key and decrypt the query result for the general public. However, the location of the routing proxy is almost certainly going to be compromised before the locations of the servers executing the queries, so in the decrypting proxy scenario, the attackers will almost certainly have the secret keys before they get access to the boxes executing the queries. There's also the problem that the messages being decrypted are the final states of finite state machines that executed the queries, so the messages to be copied over the network add up in size to at least the size of the dataset being queried. (The data can be sharded into many smaller databases, and almost certainly would be in order to speed up the homomorphic computation steps, but this doesn't cut down on the amount of network traffic necessary to retrieve all search results for a single query. A simple query on 1 TB of data, split into 10,000 databases each of 100 MB would require copying and remotely decrypting 10,000 messages, each over 100 MB in size.)

It might be possible to discover a homomorphic encryption scheme whereby knowledge of the private key allows one to devise a mapping from a higher dimensional finite state to a lower dimensional finite state machine, where the secret key for the smaller dimensional machine doesn't leak information about the secret key for the larger machine. In this case, it may be possible to perform some finishing operations on the query to prepare it for conversion to the smaller state machine and give the public the private key to the smaller state machine so that the query result could be read from the machine by the public without the public being able to observe intermediate states of the query computation. However, I believe this is far beyond our current mathematical understanding.

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.

The first time TPB was raided they took a bunch of unrelated servers too. Not sure how discriminating the police will be next time, regardless of VMs.

"If someone is paying the bill, do they really care?"

So you could cross reference names of the people raided with payment information of the VPS providers (usual suspects or top "n" providers let's say). Of course that could be hidden as well.

Other issue is how does anyone know this isn't misinformation anyway and that the VPS providers don't play a role or not as much of a role as is indicated. Just because someone is writing this or because they said it?

What advantage does it have for anyone (like this) to reveal anything about how they are situated security wise if not to lead people off the beaten track even given some possible marketing advantage?

It's not about the money, it's about not being able to care and survive as a business.

Because then they would also have to care about the thousands of other VM's that may run all kinds of stuff that is illegal somewhere, questionable, politically, socially, culturally or commercially sensitive etcetera.

No ISP can afford to be proactive about this. They cannot afford to care. Or even know.

A NAT does not stop you if you do it right. Console games have been hosting servers through NATs for the last decade.

Why would you be under a NAT? A public IP and a networking allotment is one of the core offerings of almost every cloud provider out there.

I'm not sure what your point is. AltaVista probably had to put a lot of effort into tuning every part of their infrastructure to keep the site running on that hardware. Why would TPB do that when they can simply get another VM for a fraction of the cost?

Running a top 100 site[1] on 21 VMs in 2014 is quite impressive.

[1]: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thepiratebay.se