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1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

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Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#11

Post by mapgrep »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #7
aplusbi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article, facebook has a .onion domain.

The article says its https://www.facebookcorewwwi.onion

Interestingly, since Onion addresses are derived from the public key of the host server, Facebook had to basically brute force this address.

The process is described in "Part three" here: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/facebook-hidden-services-an...

"The short answer is that for the first half of it ('facebook'), which is only 40 bits, they generated keys over and over until they got some keys whose first 40 bits of the hash matched the string they wanted."

"Then they had some keys whose name started with 'facebook', and they looked at the second half of each of them to pick out the ones with pronouncable and thus memorable syllables. The 'corewwwi' one looked best to them — meaning they could come up with a story about why that's a reasonable name for Facebook to use — so they went with it."

(Corrected: Hash of public key not private key per itsbenweeks below)

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#13

Post by nocarrier »

Alec Muffet has done a lot of work to get Facebook running on TOR and he's a true believer. I really enjoyed working with him when I was at Facebook. He also did a lot of work to get .onion domains to be recognized by registrars as a special purpose domain name. This let us issue certificates on .onion.

I don't know if the story behind the facebookcorewwwi.onion domain name itself has been talked about much, but we wanted a memorable name for the domain so we took a new cluster that hadn't been put in production yet and threw something like 500k cores at brute forcing onion names till we had a memorable domain name. Alec had a script that looked for hashes that started with facebook and then he picked the one that seemed to fit the most. And that's how we have facebookcorewwwi.onion now.

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#14

Post by Joof »

pmontra wrote: post #10
buro9 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if the user merely intends to get past a firewall the country has... their purpose isn't anonymity, but free communication, unfortunately they must don anonymity to achieve free communication.

But if one of your friends is not really your friend, and you won't know until it's too late, they'll know you got past the firewall and that could be enough to get you into troubles. You better have to stay fully anonymous, which limits what you do on Facebook. You probably want different accounts for different groups and an empty timeline in every account.

It may be that it just isn't that strictly enforced for a variety of reasons. China allows a number of VPN services that bypass the firewall to function. My guess is that it isn't a huge deal because the vast majority of people don't care enough to go out of their way to bypass the firewall; the social effects of having that firewall are still in place.

Start enforcing it heavily and the people that DO use those services may start protesting or moving into activist roles.

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#17

Post by ludamad »

nocarrier wrote: post #13

Alec Muffet has done a lot of work to get Facebook running on TOR and he's a true believer. I really enjoyed working with him when I was at Facebook. He also did a lot of work to get .onion domains to be recognized by registrars as a special purpose domain name. This let us issue certificates on .onion. I don't know if the story behind the facebookcorewwwi.onion domain name itself has been talked about much, but we w…

I don't understand quite, why so much brute force?

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#19

Post by loeg »

agildehaus wrote: post #15

I thought .onion addresses were for anonymous hidden services, which Facebook is not. What's the advantage of accessing a .onion versus using Tor to visit the normal facebook.com?

TOR is also useful for routing around damage (censorship).

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#20

Post by detaro »

ludamad wrote: post #17
nocarrier wrote: post #13

Alec Muffet has done a lot of work to get Facebook running on TOR and he's a true believer. I really enjoyed working with him when I was at Facebook. He also did a lot of work to get .onion domains to be recognized by registrars as a special purpose domain name. This let us issue certificates on .onion. I don't know if the story behind the facebookcorewwwi.onion domain name itself has been talked about much, but we w…

I don't understand quite, why so much brute force?

The onion-name is a hash of the public key the service uses, so you can't just pick a name and use it. They had to try many keypairs to find some that hashed to "facebook...." (Normally you generate your key and just use whatever name that hashes to, but it's cool to have one that's easy to remember)
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