Anonymous to set up secure Pastebin alternative

Following Pastebin.com owner’s announcement of his intention of speeding up takedown of sensitive information and his willingness to share the posters’ IP addresses with the authorities, the popular online pastebin has fallen into disfavor with the Anonymous hacking collective.

“As a recent leak of private e-mails show clearly, PasteBin is not only willing to give up IP addresses to governments – but apparently has already given many IPs to at least one private security firm,” says the Peoples Liberation Front, a group that teamed up with Anonymous in this effort.

“And these leaked e-mail’s also revealed a distinct animosity towards Anonymous. And so the PLF and Anonymous have teamed up to offer a paste service truly free of all such nonsense.”

According to the PLF, the service will not collect any connection logs, it will not censor or moderate pastes, it will have no ads, it will have a built-in URL shortener and, most importantly, all pastes will be encrypted by the browser using 256 bit AES encryption – meaning there will be no usable paste data stored on the server for the authorities or anyone else to seize.

The service is to be called AnonPaste, and is based on the open source ZeroBin software.

According to H-Online, ZeroBin works as intended. The pasted text is encrypted on the client side and then sent to the server, and can be accessed by other users only if they are given the full URL that contains the encryption key.

“The pasted text is sent encrypted and enclosed by tags,” they point out. “A possible problem with this approach is the fact that badly written search engine crawlers could follow ZeroBin links that have been posted publicly and therefore log the complete URL including the encryption key.”