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

blog.torproject.org

61–70 of 86 posts

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

#61
post #54

If you are looking for a practical use of hidden services: we use them as ingress for Docker and K8 management. You start a container that runs just tor with a config and can read the routing endpoints from your config, or link to localhost:2375 HiddenServicePort : You setup HiddenServiceAuthorizeClient with stealth auth type and a list of authorized clients. You can lock your firewall rules down as the hidden servic…

It's also great as a secure and anonymous alternative to something like noip.

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

#62
> And finally from the casuals user's PoV, the only thing that changes is that new onions are bigger, tastier and they now look like this: 7fa6xlti5joarlmkuhjaifa47ukgcwz6tfndgax45ocyn4rixm632jid.onion. For more information on the nitty-gritty details, please check out our technical specification.

It's a shame they don't have a description for technical users. I'm more interested than "bigger, tastier, and looks like this", but less interested than 13000 words of specification.

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

#63
post #60
post #54

If you are looking for a practical use of hidden services: we use them as ingress for Docker and K8 management. You start a container that runs just tor with a config and can read the routing endpoints from your config, or link to localhost:2375 HiddenServicePort : You setup HiddenServiceAuthorizeClient with stealth auth type and a list of authorized clients. You can lock your firewall rules down as the hidden servic…

> additional layer of confidentiality and authentication and additional layers of attack surfaces

From a IT Security Assessment, what would those be and their associated risk and impact factors?

One would naturally be the onion address. If they could break the 1024 bit RSA key, they could hijack the name. Risk of this happening: very low. Impact: massive especially outside the realm of tor.

Any additional risks you were thinking about? Backdoors in tor project? Hardware malware specifically designed for tor (rather than than being general)?

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

#64
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta be the change you want to see. None of my hidden service .onion sites are anything "of interest". They're just electronics and radio hobby stuff like the web has always had. Put everything on Tor as a hidden service and eventually the stigma will go away.

Do you have a guide to doing that? I would love to host some stuff on Tor just because.

Here you go: https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en

It's dead easy. Setup a web server basically like normal, but make sure it's listening only on loopback if that's important to you.

Then install tor, and add a couple of lines to the torrc and restart tor.

    HiddenServiceDir /usr/local/etc/tor/hidden_service/
    HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:8080
The keypair will be generated and you'll find the onion address in /usr/local/etc/tor/hidden_service/hostname, and it'll forward all traffic to 127.0.0.1:8080.

You can run as many hidden services as you like on the same tor instance, with different onion addresses, and forwarding to different places.

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

#65
post #13
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have cryptographically anchored pseudonymous trust, which is what Tor does. In many ways it’s stronger than the kinds of trust you run into normally.

You still have to get a correct onion address from a reputable source otherwise how do you know that you're going to the right onion and not a malicious mirror or something? So somehow there is a chain of trust, not too unlike the traditional PKI model.

Couldn't we put the onion address on the site, signed by the site/publishers key? Ignoring key exchange methods for a moment, once you have a key for "Bob the Blogger" you can verify Bob says the address is X and your url is X, so this is Bob's site.

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

#66
post #54

If you are looking for a practical use of hidden services: we use them as ingress for Docker and K8 management. You start a container that runs just tor with a config and can read the routing endpoints from your config, or link to localhost:2375 HiddenServicePort : You setup HiddenServiceAuthorizeClient with stealth auth type and a list of authorized clients. You can lock your firewall rules down as the hidden servic…

Yes, this is exactly the same way I've been using hidden services for some time. It started as a "stealth gateway" for some of my personal services (e.g. VPN, file server, etc), and grew into something like what you're describing for managing infrastructure. I'm glad to see others doing the same thing. Thanks for sharing!

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

#67
post #63
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> additional layer of confidentiality and authentication and additional layers of attack surfaces

From a IT Security Assessment, what would those be and their associated risk and impact factors? One would naturally be the onion address. If they could break the 1024 bit RSA key, they could hijack the name. Risk of this happening: very low. Impact: massive especially outside the realm of tor. Any additional risks you were thinking about? Backdoors in tor project? Hardware malware specifically designed for tor (rath…

I believe the main concern would be vulnerabilities in the Tor software itself.

That said, I don't think there's any reason to believe Tor is any more likely to be vulnerable than any other software in your stack. The project is open source, and is very much written with a focus on security and privacy.

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

#68
post #57

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 nich…

How fast/convenient is Tor for downloading large files, like video (e.g. via Bittorrent)? PS: It seems that Bittorrent over Tor is a bad idea, [1]. [1] https://blog.torproject.org/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-good-id...

It's a really bad idea. I used to stream, though. Which was fine.

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

#69

> And finally from the casuals user's PoV, the only thing that changes is that new onions are bigger, tastier and they now look like this: 7fa6xlti5joarlmkuhjaifa47ukgcwz6tfndgax45ocyn4rixm632jid.onion. For more information on the nitty-gritty details, please check out our technical specification. It's a shame they don't have a description for technical users. I'm more interested than "bigger, tastier, and looks like…

The problem with a lot of these open source projects is that you're usually so exhausted trying to get the release out you don't have much energy in explaining them! (As these types of things require developer involvement)

But agreed. This is basically offering a paragraph long abstract or read the massive white paper, without much in between.

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

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a guide to doing that? I would love to host some stuff on Tor just because.

Here you go: https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en It's dead easy. Setup a web server basically like normal, but make sure it's listening only on loopback if that's important to you. Then install tor, and add a couple of lines to the torrc and restart tor. HiddenServiceDir /usr/local/etc/tor/hidden_service/ HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:8080 The keypair will be generated and you'll find the onio…

How have you found long term maintenance of running these services? ie, running into random breakage and spending time debugging the system vs an nginx box or something... Is it set-it-and-forget-it type of system?

I've always wanted to set up onion addresses but I'm always wary to open up a new bag of worms for my personal projects.

The fact it sounds so easy is encouraging.

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