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Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor?

alecmuffett.com

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Re: Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor?

#31

Post by bawolff »

rosndo wrote: post #30
bawolff wrote: post #24

I think the only legit reason (assuming your clearnet site is using HSTS) is that .onion site reduces the risks of users screwing up. And i suppose better performance if you don't have to use exit bandwidth (i would guess, dont actually know) Users are bad at security. If they fail to set up tor, .onion links don't work, so it acts as a barrier against users shooting themselves in the foot. This is counterbalanced by…

> This is counterbalanced by higher phishing risks I would argue that this is the much bigger footgun for users. Just look at how much money darknet users are losing to the big industry of .onion phishing pages.

Its a fair argument. I think incorrect tor setup is a bigger risk for things like securedrop leaker stuff, where it is likely the first and only time the user will use TOR.

Re: Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor?

#32

Post by RL_Quine »

bauruine wrote: post #18
RL_Quine wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The behaviour of not always using the same exit means that you, over time, will almost assuredly use a malicious exit should more than zero exist. It's reckless to suggest that anybody should be using this system, your situation is almost always going to be worse than not.

The only attacks an exit alone can do is sniff all traffic and modify the traffic. There are constant checks done by the Torproject to detect bad exits that modify traffic but sniffing is not detectable of course. But both of those attacks are mitigated by https which most sites support nowadays. Firefox and therefore the Tor Browser also has an option to disable http. [0] And using an .onion service removes this att…

If they're not checking everything, any sort of non-general modification of traffic will obviously go completely unnoticed. The bad exit flag really is only ever going to catch the most obvious, ham fisted bad behaviour.

Re: Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor?

#33

Post by Asan1 »

linuxandrew wrote: post #26

I think the avoiding exit nodes part is probably the most important to me. Exit nodes have always been problematic - from memory about 20% of relays have an exit flag but most of the traffic is directed to the most performant relays. Tor actively discourages using the network for file sharing because of the exit node bottleneck. I think there are probably some uses of the Tor network that aren't fully realised yet -…

The Tor network has 1Tbps+ of real exit capacity available, real usage is a small fraction of that.

Exit capacity as a significant bottleneck has not been a realistic issue for many years.

Re: Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor?

#34

Post by shp0ngle »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #17
shp0ngle wrote: post #14

> The first benefits are authenticity and availability: if you are running Tor Browser and if you click/type in exactly the proper Onion address, you are guaranteed to be connected to what you expect — or not at all. What? Writing raw onion addresses is like writing raw IPv6 addresses. Nobody can remember then and check them. What is easier > https://nytimes.com or > ej3kv4ebuugcmuwxctx5ic7zxh73rnxt42soi3tdneu2c2em55…

Neither. Either can be mistyped. Nobody enters addresses directly anymore. Either you google them or you get them from bookmarks.

Yeah so in case of Tor, people use DDG which is the default. And DDG, being bad and handling SEO spam worse than Google, often returns wrong onion address. (Which happened to me several times.)

And you cannot really check if it's the correct one.

At least on regular net, you have a chance to spot nytime5 is fake.

Re: Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor?

#35

Post by rosndo »

bawolff wrote: post #31
rosndo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is counterbalanced by higher phishing risks I would argue that this is the much bigger footgun for users. Just look at how much money darknet users are losing to the big industry of .onion phishing pages.

Its a fair argument. I think incorrect tor setup is a bigger risk for things like securedrop leaker stuff, where it is likely the first and only time the user will use TOR.

I agree about securedrop, but the blog post seems to discuss “platforms such as Facebook, the BBC or NYT”.

Also in the case of securedrop it might make sense to have that separate from the rest of your infrastructure, so the “hidden” part of “hidden services” suddenly becomes useful.

Re: Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor?

#36

Post by heavyset_go »

thealig wrote: post #12
stingraycharles wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not even about three letter agencies; many exit nodes are being scanned for passwords, if you happen to go through http instead of https. Here’s research conducted years ago about this matter: https://www.vice.com/en/article/mgbdwv/badonion-honeypot-mal... Effectively they set up a honeypot and used clear text passwords to log in, and plenty of exit nodes picked up on this and those credentials were later used t…

the article talks about the research stumbling upon exit nodes performing MITM and other sniffing but does not refer to the exact details. is there a paper for this? only found this paper going over systematic process of exposing bad relays - http://www.cs.kau.se/philwint/spoiled_onions/pets2014.pdf

What research are you talking about? The article talks about at least two different researchers working on separate projects.

Here's the link for first one:https://web.archive.org/web/20150705184539/https://chloe.re/...

Re: Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor?

#37

Post by bauruine »

RL_Quine wrote: post #32
bauruine wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only attacks an exit alone can do is sniff all traffic and modify the traffic. There are constant checks done by the Torproject to detect bad exits that modify traffic but sniffing is not detectable of course. But both of those attacks are mitigated by https which most sites support nowadays. Firefox and therefore the Tor Browser also has an option to disable http. [0] And using an .onion service removes this att…

If they're not checking everything , any sort of non-general modification of traffic will obviously go completely unnoticed. The bad exit flag really is only ever going to catch the most obvious, ham fisted bad behaviour.

You're correct this isn't really a solution but Tor Browser has already merged https only mode [0] so this should become less of an issue in the near future.

[0]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-...

Re: Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor?

#38

Post by kevingadd »

bauruine wrote: post #20
heavyset_go wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if every exit node in the US is operated by private people or organizations, courts can compel the node owners to work with the government and not talk about it.

Can you just shutdown your nodes or can they force you to continue? Best practice for relay operators is to just stop the operation altogether if the authorities force you to attack the users.

They could probably compel you to continue, or forcibly take over the node. Once you're in NSL "we can do anything we want and you can't tell anyone about it" land, being prevented from shutting down your own business or service isn't terribly far-fetched.

Re: Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor?

#39

Post by nonrandomstring »

tempestn wrote: post #29
nonrandomstring wrote: post #25

I think some comments here are misunderstanding the intent of the article. For those saying TLS already solves... it is not advocating Tor as a replacement for transport layer security, indeed most Tor users also use TLS (and site certs) with little overhead. No, the article is asking how you could, as a website owner, make things easier on Tor users and yourself! It starts with the assumption that you care, and want…

I'm not clear from the article how having an onion address helps website operators who receive abusive traffic through Tor. Perhaps some of that abusive traffic will come in via the onion address instead, but presumably such an operator will want to continue serving their regular site to Tor exit nodes as well, so I don't see how it would actually mitigate anything, nor make the malicious traffic easier to segregate…

> I'm not clear from the article how having an onion address helps website operators who receive abusive traffic through Tor.

No, it's not clear. Also "abusive traffic" is vague. Are you mainly concerned with shitposters, trolls, DOS attacks?

> What am I missing?

Maybe you're not missing it, but essentially it's a behavioural/social rather than technical challenge. Most abusers, ones that technical changes can address, operate at scale over HTTP/S and use Tor simply as a free VPN via regular exit nodes to hide their IP. The author calls this the "Wheat/chaff problem". Viewed this way, it's easiest for a site owner to just block all of Tor and kill all legitimate users too.

Most of those bulk abusers cannot be bothered to deal with marginal cases like using an overlay network with .onion addresses whereas those who _need_ Tor are highly motivated.

Other kinds of abusers, like persistent troll posters, are better dealt with by other means even if you're using HTTP/S.

Re: Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor?

#40

Post by Joakal »

krageon wrote: post #15
TuringTest wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't there warrant canaries set up to prevent this? Every website that can be compelled to behave that way should have one.

> Aren't there warrant canaries set up to prevent this? No, because the police will tell you to not tell anyone about the court order. If you do so (for example using a warrant canary), you will be in big trouble. Those canaries were always a convenient fiction, almost to the point of it being entirely in question whether or not this fiction was created in good faith.

Can those warrant canaries holders who follow police/court orders, be sued for false advertising?

Seems like a catch 22 that it's a lose-lose.

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