The Day I Logged Into an Icelandic VPS
When I started building SecurityNet, I wasn't particularly interested in becoming a system administrator.
My focus was always the application itself.
- The encryption.
- The file transfers.
- The user experience.
- The architecture.
The server was simply a supporting component.
Its job was very limited.
SecurityNet uses a small mediator to introduce two computers to each other before they establish a direct connection.
Once that introduction is complete, the server steps out of the way.
Or at least, that's how I'd always thought about it.
But as I started thinking more seriously about evidence rather than assumptions, I realised something.
I had spent years explaining how SecurityNet worked.
What I hadn't done was investigate what the supporting infrastructure was actually doing.
Those are two very different things.
The website described the architecture.
The software implemented the architecture.
But the server had its own operating system, services, configuration files and logging mechanisms.
I'd never really examined them in any systematic way.
That needed to change.
So, on a quiet Sunday afternoon, I opened a terminal window and logged into my virtual private server.
Not in London.
Not in Amsterdam.
In Iceland.
The choice of location wasn't accidental.
Iceland has a strong reputation for privacy and freedom of expression, which made it an attractive place to host the mediator.
Geography wasn't the interesting part.
For the first time, I wasn't looking at my own application code.
I was looking underneath it.
I started asking simple questions.
- Was anything being written to the system logs?
- Was the mediator recording connection information?
- Were there web server access logs?
- Was metadata being retained somewhere I hadn't expected?
At that point, I didn't know what I would find.
And that's exactly why I was there.
Because assumptions don't produce evidence.
Investigation does.
The first command I typed wasn't particularly complicated.
But it immediately revealed something I hadn't anticipated.
There were logs.
