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Tor's Fall Harvest: The Next Generation of Onion Services

blog.torproject.org

31–40 of 86 posts

Re: Tor's Fall Harvest: The Next Generation of Onion Services

#31
post #22
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the “correct onion address” for that hashcode, but you have to obtain the hashcode somehow.

And you might be obtaining a fake link from one of my phishing schemes that mimic the services you thought you were visiting...

No one is arguing that onion links are impervious to being lied about. But domain names don't have that property either. In fact, it's somewhat easier to compromise many domain names.

Re: Tor's Fall Harvest: The Next Generation of Onion Services

#32
post #28

The issue I've always had with onion addresses is that you can't remember them, which means you need to keep a list of bookmarks saved locally somewhere, which–if you're using tor to avoid prosecution–is pretty incriminating. What's the solution?

Keep one bookmark to a community directory? The plausible deniability is that you just visit for the catpicures1685isbis.onion, and not for cocainehookerz3288uiop.onion

Re: Tor's Fall Harvest: The Next Generation of Onion Services

#33
post #32
post #28

The issue I've always had with onion addresses is that you can't remember them, which means you need to keep a list of bookmarks saved locally somewhere, which–if you're using tor to avoid prosecution–is pretty incriminating. What's the solution?

Keep one bookmark to a community directory? The plausible deniability is that you just visit for the catpicures1685isbis.onion, and not for cocainehookerz3288uiop.onion

But now you have to trust that community directory not to give you the wrong onions...

Re: Tor's Fall Harvest: The Next Generation of Onion Services

#34
post #8

I have mixed feelings about Tor. As a proxy to hide your IP address it makes perfect sense to me. But what's the end result of hidden services? I want to be anonymous sometimes but I can't think of a time when I want the host of a service I use to be anonymous. In most situations their identity is actually important to me. I want to know the source of news, to trust that I'm sending a message to the right person, to…

>But what's the end result of hidden services?

It's not just hidden, it's also decentralized. You can:

* Register and publish a site in seconds ...

* ... without a central registar (just generate a key) ...

* ... from just about any Internet connection.

* Get a secure transport without the clusterfuck of backdoors that is HTTPS.

* All for a concentrated audience that likes a different, simpler, smaller, homier Web.

Re: Tor's Fall Harvest: The Next Generation of Onion Services

#35
post #33
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep one bookmark to a community directory? The plausible deniability is that you just visit for the catpicures1685isbis.onion, and not for cocainehookerz3288uiop.onion

But now you have to trust that community directory not to give you the wrong onions...

Which is why information like that should be stored in the blockchain where it can't be modified.

Re: Tor's Fall Harvest: The Next Generation of Onion Services

#36
Here's a question I have on this -- I've been eagerly awaiting the new functionality to have onion addresses where using them doesn't reveal their existence. So the address itself becomes a form of shared key.

But this opens another possibility of one-time addresses, and address scalability. My question is, does network cost increase with number of addresses? If peers on the network are using one-time addresses to form circuits, will that scale fine?

Basically I am envisioning two people communicating via dedicated addresses for their own use only. So a single key becomes a network channel to send data to a specific peer. That "peer" could actually be many different devices, but all ultimately connect to the same distributed application with a shared state.

So basically onion addresses are usernames which also let you pipe data to that user, right? How is this not the coolest thing ever?

Re: Tor's Fall Harvest: The Next Generation of Onion Services

#37
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But now you have to trust that community directory not to give you the wrong onions...

Which is why information like that should be stored in the blockchain where it can't be modified.

I assume this is already done, and if not why not?

The practical implementation would be the bookmarking service would authenticate their links against this blockchain, and the user would either have an agent on their system to validate the claims, or another 3rd party who they trusted to validate the claims?

Re: Tor's Fall Harvest: The Next Generation of Onion Services

#38
I used to use Tor to bypass censorship on pr0n in my country and ended up trying to run a hidden service for fun. My biggest peeve with was the domain name. I mean, sure I understand why it isn't human readable but then there are so many ways to counter that. We've got the blockchain and we have the IPFS way to handle these things too.

I'm hoping at some point blockchain DNS systems are adopted by mainstream (or niche in case of Tor) vendors. It would make it so much much easier to name onions.

Re: Tor's Fall Harvest: The Next Generation of Onion Services

#39
post #14

Does it fix the LONG standing issue that Dr. Krawetz keeps discussing on his blog that makes it trivial to DOS an onion site? Description in the section about ‘Eddie’. https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/762-At...

He didn't discover an issue - he just FUD'd long enough until a few people believed he did.

That he believes there is something "suspicious" about Tor nodes because their IP doesn't match to any country or AS name in the free distribution of the GeoIP database built into Tor is just smh bad

Why he also believes bots accessing his HS has anything to do with Tor Exit nodes is also beyond me .. but he provides no evidence for any of that either

Re: Tor's Fall Harvest: The Next Generation of Onion Services

#40
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to that, one useful application for hidden services is to enable SSH login on machines that are behind some impenetrable NATs/firewalls that you can't open up for inbound connections. Have a machine behind mobile, NAT only internet? Set up a tor hidden service and log in without any problems!

I see this as a valid point. You don't need Tor for that, any local app could proxy a connection that way. But, yes, it is a useful side effect of Tor.

First of all, actually, no, a "local app" can't do that. The problem is that the machine doesn't have a globally reachable address, and that's not something that you can solve by changing the software on the machine, you need some external service that provides you with a globally reachable address and a way to forward connection requests for that address to your machine. That is a service that the Tor network provides.

Obviously, Tor is not the only solution to this problem, but it is one that has the nice property that you don't need to register any accounts, you don't need to pay for anything, the availability of the Tor network is pretty good ...

Also I am not so sure I would call it a side effect, for two reasons:

1. Any application that grows the anonymity set of Tor is useful for the goals of the Tor network. Even if your SSH session does not have any use for the anonymity that Tor provides, it still is good for the Tor network that you add cover traffic to the network for those who need it.

2. Decentralization has a lot of overlap with anonymity, and as such I would consider this use actually to be well within the use cases that Tor is intended for: ISPs build networks that increaslingly make it difficult to use your own devices for anything more than consuming content that is delivered from the network, thus contributing to the growth of the kind of centralized services that don't provide any anonymity at all. Using Tor to access your own machines and thus enabling you to build infrastructure that is not inspected by third parties is very much aligned with the goals of the Tor project.

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