June 2018 - tor-dev - lists.torproject.org

the consequences of deprecating debian alpha repos with every new major branch
by nusenu 21 Dec '21

21 Dec '21

Hi, tldr: - more outdated relays (that is a claim I'm making and you could easily proof me wrong by recreating the 0.3.3.x alpha repos and ship 0.3.3.7 in them and see how things evolve after a week or so) - more work for the tpo website maintainer - less happy relay operators [3][4] - more work for repo maintainers? (since a new repo needs to be created) When the tor 0.3.4 alpha repos (deb.torproject.org) first appeared on 2018-05-23 I was about to submit a PR for the website to include it in the sources.list generator [1] on tpo but didn't do it because I wanted to wait for a previous PR to be merged first. The outstanding PR got merged eventually (2018-06-28) but I still did not submit a PR to update the repo generator for 0.3.4.x nonetheless and here is why. Recently I was wondering why are there so many relays running tor version 0.3.3.5-rc? (see OrNetStats or Relay Search) (> 3.2% CW fraction) Then I realized that this was the last version the tor-experimental-0.3.3.x-* repos were shipping before they got abandoned due to the new 0.3.4.x-* repos (I can no longer verify it since they got removed by now). Peter made it clear in the past that the current way to have per-major-version debian alpha repos (i.e. tor-experimental-0.3.4.x-jessie) will not change [2]: > If you can't be bothered to change your sources.list once or twice a > year, then you probably should be running stable. but maybe someone else would be willing to invoke a "ln" commands everytime a new new alpha repo is born. tor-alpha-jessie -> tor-experimental-0.3.4.x-jessie once 0.3.5.x repos are created the link would point to tor-alpha-jessie -> tor-experimental-0.3.5.x-jessie It is my opinion that this will help reduce the amount of relays running outdated versions of tor. It will certainly avoid having to update the tpo website, which isn't a big task and could probably be automated but it isn't done currently. "..but that would cause relay operators to jump from i.e. 0.3.3.x to 0.3.4.x alphas (and break setups)!" Yes, and I think that is better than relays stuck on an older version because the former repo no longer exists and operators still can choose the old repos which will not jump to newer major versions. [1] https://www.torproject.org/docs/debian.html.en#ubuntu [2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/14997#comment:3 [3] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2018-June/015549.html [4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26474 -- https://twitter.com/nusenu_ https://mastodon.social/@nusenu

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DNS-over-HTTPS (DOH) in Firefox/Torbrowser
by nusenu 02 Jul '20

02 Jul '20

Hi, since Mozilla did tests [0] on DOH [1] in Firefox I was wondering if Torbrowser developers have put any thought into that as well? Note: I'm _not_ suggesting to use DOH in torbrowser I'm just asking because the answer probably matters for exit documentation in the relay guide if clients do DNS themselves over TCP connections instead of relying on the exit (even if torbrowser is not the only tor client). thanks, nusenu [0] https://www.ghacks.net/2018/03/20/firefox-dns-over-https-and-a-worrying-shi… [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hoffman-dns-over-https/ -- https://mastodon.social/@nusenu twitter: @nusenu_

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Lets give every circuit its own exit IP?
by nusenu 18 Mar '20

18 Mar '20

The unbearable situation with Google's reCAPTCHA motivated this email (but it is not limited to this specific case). This idea came up when seeing a similar functionality in unbound (which has it for a different reason). Assumption: There are systems that block some tor exit IP addresses (most likely the bigger once), but they are not blocked due to the fact that they are tor exits. It just occurred that the IP got flagged because of "automated / malicious" requests and IP reputation systems. What if every circuit had its "own" IP address at the exit relay to avoid causing collateral damage to all users of the exit if one was bad? (until the exit runs out of IPs and starts to recycle previously used IPs again) The goal is to avoid accumulating a bad "reputation" for the single used exit IP address that affects all tor users of that exit. Instead of doing it on the circuit level you could do it based on time. Change the exit IP every 5 minutes (but do _not_ change the exit IPs for _existing_ circuits even if they live longer than 5 minutes). Yes, no one has that many IPv4 addresses but with the increasing availability of IPv6 at exits and destinations, this could be feasible to a certain extend, depending on how many IPv6 addresses the exit operator has. There are exit operators that have entire /48 IPv6 blocks. problems: - will not solve anything since reputation will shift to netblocks as well (How big of a netblock are you willing to block?) - you can tell two tor users easily apart from each other even if they use the same exit (or more generally: you can tell circuits apart). There might be all kinds of bad implications that I'm not thinking off right now. - check.tpo would no longer be feasible - how can do we still provide the list of exit IPs for easy blocking? Exits could signal their used netblock via their descriptor. What if they don't? (that in turn opens new kinds of attacks where an exit claims to be /0 and the target effectively blocks everything) - more state to track and store at the exit -... some random thoughts, nusenu -- https://mastodon.social/@nusenu twitter: @nusenu_

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UX improvement proposal: Onion auto-redirects using Alt-Svc HTTP header
by George Kadianakis 26 Oct '18

26 Oct '18

UX improvement proposal: Onion auto-redirects using Alt-Svc HTTP header ======================================================================== 1. Motivation: Lots of high-profile websites have onion addresses these days (e.g. Tor , NYT, blockchain, ProPublica). All those websites seem confused on what's the right way to inform their users about their onion addresses. Here are some confusion examples: a) torproject.org does not even advertise their onion address to Tor users (!!!) b) blockchain.info throws an ugly ASCII page to Tor users mentioning their onion address and completely wrecking the UX (loses URL params, etc.) c) ProPublica has a "Browse via Tor" section which redirects to the onion site. Ideally there would be a consistent way for websites to inform their users about their onion counterpart. This would provide the following positives: + Tor users would use onions more often. That's important for user education and user perception, and also to partially dispell the darkweb myth. + Website operators wouldn't have to come up with ad-hoc ways to advertise their onion services, which sometimes results in complete breakage of the user experience (particularly with blockchain) This proposal specifies a simple way forward here that's far from perfect, but can still provide benefits and also improve user-education around onions so that in the future we could employ more advanced techniques. Also see Tor ticket #21952 for more discussion on this: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21952 2. Proposal Websites use the Alt-Svc HTTP header to specify their onion counterpart: http://httpwg.org/http-extensions/alt-svc.html The Tor Browser intercepts that header (if any) and auto-redirects the user to the onion site. Tor Browser only does so if the header is served over HTTPS. (That's it.) 3. Improvements 3.1. User education through notifications To minimize the probability of users freaking out about auto-redirects Tor Browser could inform the user that the auto-redirect is happening. This could happen with a small notification bar [*] below the URL bar informing users that "Tor Browser is auto-redirecting you to the secure onion site". The notification bar could also have a question mark button that provides the user with additional information on the merits of onion sites and why they should like them. [*]: like this one: http://www.topdreamweaverextensions.com/UserFiles/Image/firefox-bar.jpg 3.2. Auto-redirects too intrusive? Make them optional. If we think that auto redirects are too intrusive, we should consider making them optional, or letting the website specify the desired behavior. If a website wants to specify an onion address but doesn't like auto-redirects, it could specify that as part of Alt-Svc and we could still inform the user that an onion is available using a notification bar again. 4. Drawbacks This proposal is far from the perfect solution of course. Here are a few reasons why: 4.1. Auto-redirects are scary Novice users or paranoid users might freak out with auto-redirects since it's unexpected. They might think they are under attack or they got hacked. An argument against that is that we are already using HTTPS-everywhere which is basically a redirection layer, and while its redirection technique is simpler, sometimes the derivative URL is not similar to the original URL, and we still don't see people freaking out. I think that's because people trust Tor Browser to do the right thing. Combining this knowledge with section 3.1 might solve this problem. 4.2. No security/performance benefits While we could come up with auto-redirect proposals that provide security and performance benefits, this proposal does not actually provide any of those. As a matter of fact, the security remains the same as connecting to normal websites (since we trust its HTTP headers), and the performance gets worse since we first need to connect to the website, get its headers, and then also connect to the onion. Still _all_ the website approaches mentioned in the "Motivation" section suffer from the above drawbacks, and sysadmins still come up with ad-hoc ways to inform users abou their onions. So this simple proposal will still help those websites and also pave the way forward for future auto-redirect techniques. 4.3. Alt-Svc does not do exactly what we want I read in a blog post [*] that using Alt-Svc header "doesn’t change the URL in the location bar, document.location or any other indication of where the resource is; this is a “layer below” the URL.". IIUC, this is not exactly what we want because users will not notice the onion address, they will not get the user education part of the proposal and their connection will still be slowed down. I think we could perhaps change this in Tor Browser so that it rewrites the onion address to make it clear to people that they are now surfing the onionspace. [*]: https://www.mnot.net/blog/2016/03/09/alt-svc 5. The future As I said this is just a simple proposal to introduce the auto-redirect concept to people, and also to help some sysadmins who are currently coming up with weird ways to inform people about their onions. It's not the best way to do this, but it's definitely one of the simplest ways. In the future we could implement with more advanced auto-redirect proposals like: a) Have a "domains to onions" map into HTTPS-everywhere and have it do the autoredirects for us (performance benefits, and security benefits under many threat models). b) Bake onion addresses into SSL certificates and Let's Encrypt as suggested by comment:42 in #21952. But both of the designs above require non-trivial engineering/policy work and would still confuse people. So I think starting with a simple approach that will educate users and then moving to more advanced designs is a more normative way to go. ====================================================================== Let me know what you think :) (Should this be part of torspec?)

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Sandboxed Tor Browser should be officially developed
by juanjo 26 Jul '18

26 Jul '18

I do not understand why Sandboxed Tor Browser is now deprecated when it should be the new thing in security features. It works well and stopped already some 0days in the past and today I see that not only is officially "*WARNING: Active development is on indefinite hiatus"* (https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorBrowser/Sandbox/Linux) the last commit is from 3 months ago, but still it works well. And today I see that for the Firefox 60 ESR this support will be removed (https://gitweb.torproject.org/builders/tor-browser-build.git/commit/?id=dc3…) Is there a hidden agenda to allow LEA/governments to exploit Tor Browser users easily? Because I don't think maintaining the sandboxed version is that much work and it is a great protection for many users. So please, make Sandboxed Tor Browser an official thing.

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Proposal 293: Other ways for relays to know when to publish
by Nick Mathewson 17 Jul '18

17 Jul '18

Filename: 293-know-when-to-publish.txt Title: Other ways for relays to know when to publish Author: Nick Mathewson Created: 30-May-2018 Status: Open Target: 0.3.5 1. Motivation In proposal 275, we give reasons for dropping the published-on field from consensus documents, to improve the performance of consensus diffs. We've already changed Tor (as of 0.2.9.11) to allow us to set those fields far in the future -- but unfortunately, there is still one use case that requires them: relays use the published-on field to tell if they are about to fall out of the consensus and need to make new descriptors. Here we propose two alternative mechanisms for relays to know that they should publish descriptors, so we can enact proposal 275 and set the published-on field to some time in the distant future. 2. Mechanism One: The StaleDesc flag Authorities should begin voting aon a new StaleDesc flag. When authorities vote, if the most recent published_on date for a descriptor has over DESC_IS_STALE_INTERVAL in the past, the authorities should vote to give the StaleDesc flag to that relay. If any relay sees that it has the StaleDesc flag, it should upload some time in the first half of the voting interval. (Implementors should take care not to re-upload over and over, though: Relays won't lose the flag until the next voting interval is reached.) (Define DESC_IS_STALE_INTERVAL as equal to FORCE_REGENERATE_DESCRIPTOR_INTERVAL.) 3. Mechanism Two: Uploading more frequently when rejected. Tor relays should remember the last time at which they uploaded a descriptor that was accepted by a majority of dirauths. If this time is more than FAST_RETRY_DESCRIPTOR_INTERVAL in the past, we mark our descriptor as dirty from mark_my_descriptor_dirty_if_too_old(). 4. Implications for proposal 275 Once most relays are running verions that support the features above, and once authorities are generating consensuses with the StaleDesc flag, there will no longer be a need to keep the published time in consensus documents accurate -- we can start setting it to some time in the distant future, per proposal 275.

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Proposal: Expose raw bwauth votes
by Tom Ritter 17 Jul '18

17 Jul '18

I'm not sure, but I think https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21377 needed a proposal so I tried to write one up. -tom

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HS v3 client authorization types
by Suphanat Chunhapanya 12 Jul '18

12 Jul '18

As I am currently implementing the client authorization for onion service v3 (https://github.com/torproject/tor/pull/36) I found some problems in how we should let the users configure the client auth for their services. Before getting into the problem, I will explain how it works first. -- Each client will have two private keys to authenticate with the service. One is x25519 key and the other is ed25519 key. The x25519 one is used to decrypt the descriptor when the client wants to access the service, so if the client is not authorized, it will never know the introduction points, the intro auth keys, and so on, and then it absolutely cannot access the service. The ed25519 one is for another layer of authentication. Even if the client can decrypt the descriptor using the x25519 private key, it still need to have the ed25519 to authenticate itself directly to the service using the extension field in INTRODUCE1 cell. At first glance, it seems that the ed25519 one is not necessary because, if the client is able to decrypt the descriptor, it already means the client is already authenticated. Why do we need to have another layer of authenticate? The answer is that the ed25519 provides more find-grained access control for example: 1) you could use it to revoke a client without the need to rotate all the intro points and push new descriptor. 2) you can have more fine-grained control on your users and potentially offer different types of access structure to different users using their ed25519 keys as identifier. -- The spec says that the client must have both keys and use both to authenticate, but, for me, these two things are quite independent. I think they can be considered two different authentication types. The service should be able to enable one and disable the other. For example, If I disable the x25519 while I enable ed25519, I can add a new client immediately without the need to rotate the intro points. If rotating intro points is not an issue and the only purpose of ed25519 is to have more fine-grained access control, the current spec is fine. But if rotating intro points is an issue, we should rethink about this. So, I created a PR for the change in torspec. https://github.com/torproject/torspec/pull/7 (in the PR, the x25519 auth is called 'basic' and the ed25519 auth is called 'intro') We need your opinions about this. Should we let the service enable one while disable the other? Or should we require the service to enable both for all clients? If you want to let the service be able to enable one while disable the other, do you have any opinion on how to configure the torrc? Cheers, haxxpop This is a discussion log that we had earlier. [22:39:23] <meejah> v3 "basic" auth is different from v2 "basic" auth, right? Perhaps a different name-string for the v3 one would be good? [22:39:44] <asn> meejah: good point [22:39:57] <asn> perhaps we can name it "pubkey" auth or something more UX-y [22:40:35] <meejah> asn: sounds good to me (my perspective is to avoid naming-weirdness for controllers and having to explain to users "well, this 'basic' is different from this other 'basic' because you said version=3") [22:40:43] <asn> right [22:40:44] <asn> makse sense [22:40:51] <asn> haxxpop: ^ what do u think [22:40:51] <asn> ? [22:45:01] <haxxpop> meejah, asn yes I agreed. maybe we should change it to something else [22:46:10] <haxxpop> meejah, asn In fact, the word 'basic' appears only once in the v3 spec ! [22:48:05] <asn> haxxpop: yeah... perhaps we can rename it to "pubkey" which describes it pretty well for nerds. or to "standard" which is a synonym for "basic" and it will confuse everyone. [22:50:59] <haxxpop> asn, I think both "basic" and "intro" use pubkeys. [22:51:26] <haxxpop> asn, I think if we call "basic" "pubkey", it may imply that "intro" doesn't use pubkeys. [22:51:35] <asn> true [22:52:20] <asn> i'm still not sure if i like: [22:52:20] <asn> + HiddenServiceAuthorizeClient basic client-name,client-name,... [22:52:20] <asn> + HiddenServiceAuthorizeClient intro client-name,client-name,... [22:52:30] <asn> mainly because it's gonna be quite hard to explain to people what these two lines mean [22:52:34] <asn> (to hs operators) [22:52:37] <asn> like what's the difference [22:52:42] <asn> and usually they should have both enabled [22:52:53] <asn> what i imagined initially is that we would keep the torrc logic the same [22:53:04] <asn> and maybe expose a torrc option for advanced users to do HiddenServiceDisableIntroAuth [22:53:07] <asn> or something [22:53:11] <asn> anyway i need to think about this! [22:53:25] <haxxpop> asn, Nice point [23:08:35] <meejah> asn: haxxpop: "pubkey" sounds good to me. People who are "just clients" probably don't care what the string is (? maybe? UX people?) and people running the services probably count as "nerds" :) [23:08:59] <asn> agreed [23:09:02] <meejah> (but, I don't personally understand what these schemes are so maybe I shouldn't be naming them ;) [23:09:08] <asn> ideally those things should not be exposed to the users anyway [23:09:19] <asn> they should be wrapped by the browser or something [23:11:46] <meejah> asn: in txtorcon at least, they aren't really; preferred new-API is "async with tor.onion_authentication(onion_host, some_auth_object)" for py3, or "tor.add_onion_authentication(..)" -- ideally this can be used by "actual application" to transmit the credentials to users in some way [23:11:52] <meejah> (e.g. maybe via magic-wormhole) [23:12:35] <meejah> I assume that *ideally* the clients generate keypairs, and send pubkeys to the service..? [23:22:45] <asn> meejah: yes ideally clients generate keypairs [23:23:00] <asn> meejah: but service-generated keypairs can also be done, to immitate current symmetric-key design [23:26:08] <dmr> asn: there's lots of reasons to keep v2 "basic" separate from v3 "basic" - limited bug reports, presentations, error/log messages, internet searches, ... [23:26:34] <dmr> like meejah I also don't know what the schemes are, so that's the extent of my input :) [23:26:51] <dmr> glad to hear it sounds like we're all in agreement to use something other than "basic" for v3 [23:46:12] <meejah> asn: okay, ack. It would be neat to see an application using magic-wormhole for an "invite a new client" flow; perhaps I'll try a PoC when v3-auth is available; is it in master already??

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is that the correct URL in the TBB design document?
by nusenu 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Hi, https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#identifier-linkabili… writes: > While the vast majority of web requests adheres to the circuit and > connection unlinkability requirement there are still corner cases we > need to treat separately or that lack a fix altogether. "lack a fix altogether" links back to the design document itself: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/ is that the correct URL or a copy-paste error? thanks! -- https://mastodon.social/@nusenu twitter: @nusenu_

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Proposal: Check Maxmind GeoIP DB before distributing
by Jaskaran Singh 04 Jul '18

04 Jul '18

Hi List, Please have a look at this proposal. Filename: Check-Maxmind-GeoIP-DB-before-distributing.txt Title: Check Maxmind GeoIP-DB before distributing Ticket(s): #26240 Author: Jaskaran Singh Created: June 2018 Status: Open 0. Motivation and Overview We're using Maxmind's (company registered in the US) GeoIP Database, which is not just antithetical to the philosophy that one should not totally rely on a service/software for all needs, but has some serious security repercussions too. Trusting Maxmind's GeoIP Database is dangerous, as it may lead to some possible attacks on the Network. We propose that the Database be checked for integrity before distributing to the users. The whole process of checking for integrity can be assigned to the Directory Authorities (or any trusted systems) who would be responsible for completing it using a script. We should also give a choice to the user whether she wants to use Maxmind's DB or any other DB of her choice, or even to not use any Geo-IP DB at all. 1. Threat Model We assume an adversary that is capable of introducing false information in the Maxmind GeoIP database, either by it's influence over the company or otherwise. The adversary also has enough resources to perform Sybil attack on the network. 2. Attacks on the Network 2.1 Sybil attack under the Radar The Tor Network is constantly monitored for any suspicious spike in nodes, as it may be an indication of an oncoming/undergoing sybil attack. A powerful adversary can coerce Maxmind to map some specific IP address blocks to different countries. This may lead to people/scripts monitoring the network to not feel suspicious about this event, and would result in the adversary staying under the radar. 2.2 False Location indication for a shady node A large percentage of people don't want the exit of their circuits to be located in certain countries where the communication is under surveillance. The powerful adversary knows this as well. Users generally add a line in their config that allows them to not form a circuit through nodes located in those locations. To overcome this, the adversary can coerce Maxmind to alter it's database to map some particular IP's to locations which the user thinks are havens of free speech. 3. Design of the Solution We should check Maxmind database against it's own previous versions. Additionally we should also simply stop using GeoIP database intrinsically for every purpose but still allow users to plug in their own databases through the interface we implement. Perhaps the latter can be introduced as ./configure option for when the user is highly distrustful of Maxmind and wants to use a service she trusts, or doesn't wants to use at all. The two solutions are explained below. 3.1 Checking for integrity Step 1: The Dir Authorities (or any trusted computers) fetch the latest maxmind geoip-db along with its previous versions. Step 2: Tor Nodes' location are checked against the previous versions for any changes. Step 3: All the Dir Authorities perform the above two steps independently of each other. A count of the number of changes in node locations is maintained. If the changes are in significant amount, they are viewed with suspicion, since this can be the preparation of a sybil attack by the adversary. In such a case, the new changes into the database can be discarded. Though, even change in a single node's location is concerning, but it is not easy attribute that change to malice. Sometimes there are genuine reasons for a location to change. Step 4. This database is then distributed to the users. 3.2 Doing away with GeoIP location altogether GeoIP databases are occasionally un-realiable and can be done away with safely. We can provide a ./configure option to the users that enables them to plug in their own trusted service. If the user doesn't have access to a database of her own choice, she can simply choose Maxmind, or not use any database at all. It would remove our dependence from just one database, and diversify our usage. 4. Licensing issues Maxmind has a pretty liberal license when it comes to their database, as summarized below Maxmind - CC BY-SA 4.0 * Copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format * remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially 5. Dealing with false positives Maxmind calculates geolocation of an IP addr using WHOIS records, Reverse DNS etc. It claims to have precision rate of 99.5% on country level. The other 0.5% is more likely to be those IP addresses for which neither WHOIS record nor Reverse DNS are setup. A very large percentage of Tor Nodes are run from datacenters, which usually have all their records set up. It's highly unlikely for an IP address belonging to a datacenter to be mapped to a wrong location. Hence, false positives would be very few, and can be safely ignored after a simple manual/scripted investigation. -- Jaskaran Veer Singh (jvsg) jvsg1303 at gmail dot com PGP 2814 3FB7 A32D 429B 092E 27F0 8AA3 C532 9E1A 6AD8

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