commit 4fff62bb20668026c5a04107bd0611d661947659 Author: Colin Childs <colin@torproject.org> Date: Thu Apr 27 22:52:44 2017 -0500 Add answer for single onion services to operator.txt --- plain/operator.txt | 16 ++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 16 insertions(+) diff --git a/plain/operator.txt b/plain/operator.txt index e09d63d..d9af822 100644 --- a/plain/operator.txt +++ b/plain/operator.txt @@ -11,4 +11,20 @@ Q. How do I run a standard onion service? Q. How do I run a single onion service? Q. What is the difference between a single and standard onion service? +A. Over the past several years, we've collaborated with many large scale service providers such as Facebook and Riseup, organizations that deployed Onion Services to improve their performance. + +Onion services are great because they offer both anonymity on the service and the client side. However, there are cases where the onion service does not require anonymity. The main example of this is when the service provider does not need to hide the location of its servers. + +As a reminder, an onion service connection between a client and a service goes through 6 hops, while a regular connection with Tor is 3 hops. Onion services are much slower than regular Tor connections because of this. With single onion services, a service can now specify in its configuration file that it does not need anonymity, thus cutting the 3 hops between the service and its Rendezvous Point and speeding up the connection. + +IMAGES FROM https://blog.torproject.org/blog/whats-new-tor-0298 + +For security reasons, if this option is enabled, only single onion service can be configured. They can't coexist with a regular onion service. Because this removes the anonymity aspect of the service, we took extra precautions so that it's very difficult to enable a single onion by mistake. + +In your torrc file, here is how you do it: + +HiddenServiceNonAnonymousMode 1 +HiddenServiceSingleHopMode 1 + +Please read about these options before you enable them in the manual page <https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en>