tor-dev November 2023

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5 participants
3 discussions

When RFC 7686 and transparent proxies collide
by Matt Jolly 28 Sep '24

28 Sep '24

Hello Everyone, I recently inadvertently opened a much larger can of worms than I'd intended when fixing a bug reported downstream where cURL would, when configured with certain DNS backends, fail to resolve .onion addresses. https://bugs.gentoo.org/887287 After doing some digging I discovered that the c-ares library was updated in 2018 to intentionally fail to resolve .onion addresses in line with RFC 7686, and another reported 'Bug' in cURL for leaking .onion DNS requests: https://github.com/c-ares/c-ares/issues/196 https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/543 I took the obviously sane and uncontroversial approach of making sure that cURL would always behave the same way regardless of the DNS backend in use, and that it would output a useful error message when it failed to resolve a .onion address. Unfortunately, this has made a lot of people very angry and been ~~widely regarded as a bad move~~panned by a small subset of downstream cURL users: https://github.com/curl/curl/discussions/11125 https://infosec.exchange/@harrysintonen/110977751446379372 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/issues/202 I accept that, in particular, transproxy users are being inconvenienced, but I also don't want to go back to 'cURL leaks .onion DNS requests _sometimes_'. As a career sysadmin and downstream bug triager: this is the stuff that keeps me up late at night. Quite literally, far too often. I have found, however that the downstreams that I expected to be inconvenienced most (Whonix and Tails) simply use socks: https://github.com/Kicksecure/sdwdate/commit/5724d83b258a469b7a9a7bbc651539… https://github.com/Kicksecure/tb-updater/commit/d040c12085a527f4d39cb1751f2… https://github.com/Kicksecure/usability-misc/blob/8f722bbbc7b7f2f3a35619a5a… https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/issues/19488 https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/merge_requests/1123 I've asked in the Tor Specifications issue (inspired by Silvio's suggestions), and in the cURL issue, but I seem to be getting nowhere and the impacted users are clamouring for a quick band-aid solution, which I feel will work out worse for everyone in the long run: >How can client applications (safely): > >1.discover that they're in a Tor-enabled environment >2.resolve onion services only via Tor in that circumstance >3.not leak .onion resolution attempts at all > >Right now, not making these requests in the first place is the >safest (and correct) thing to do, however inconvenient it may be. >Rather than immediately trying to come up with a band-aid approach >to this problem, a sane mechanism needs to be implemented to: > >1.prevent each application from coming up with their own solution >2.prevent inconsistency in .onion resolution (i.e. no "oh it only >leaks if DO_ONION_RESOLUTION is set") >3.provide a standardised mechanism for applications that want to be Tor >aware to discover that they're in a Tor-enabled environment. I'm not particularly attached to that last point, but it's worth discussing. On a related note: -is the use of a transparent proxy recommended? -is there a sane alternative that involves as minimal configuration as possible for these users? I'm not sure what the best way forward is here, but I'm hoping that actual Tor developers might have a useful opinion on the matter, or at least be able to point me in the right direction. Thanks for your time, Cheers, Matt

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Fact-checking a claim about relay/bridge fingerprint authentication
by David Fifield 25 Feb '24

25 Feb '24

Cecylia, Arlo, Serene, Shelikhoo, and I are writing a research paper about Snowflake. Here is a draft: https://www.bamsoftware.com/papers/snowflake/snowflake.20231003.e6e1c30d.pdf We're writing to check a factual claim in the section about having multiple backend bridges. Basically, we wanted it to be possible for there to be multiple Snowflake bridge sites run by different groups of people, and we did not want to share the same relay identity keys across all bridge sites, because of the increased risk of the keys being exposed. Therefore every bridge site has its own relay identity, which requires the client to know the relay fingerprints in advance and that it be the client (and not, e.g., the broker) that decides which bridge to use. 1. Is our general description (quoted below) of the design constraints as they bear on Tor correct? 2. Is §4.2 "CERTS cells" the right part of tor-spec to cite to make our point? https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/blob/b345ca044131b2eb18e6a… https://github.com/turfed/snowflake-paper/blob/e6e1c30dde6716dc5e54a32f2134… A Tor bridge is identified by a long-term identity public key. If, on connecting to a bridge, the client finds that the bridge's identity is not the expected one, the client will terminate the connection \cite[\S 4.2]{tor-spec}. The Tor client can configure at most one identity per bridge; there is no way to indicate (with a certificate, for example) that multiple identities should be considered equivalent. This constraint leaves two options: either all Snowflake bridges must share the same cryptographic identity, or else it must be the client that makes the choice of what bridge to use. While the former option is possible to do (by synchronizing identity keys across servers), every added bridge would increase the risk of compromising the all-important identity keys. Our vision was that different bridge sites would run in different locations with their own management teams, and that any compromise of a bridge site should affect that site only. In my own experiments, providing an incorrect relay fingerprint leads to errors in connection_or_client_learned_peer_id: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/blob/tor-0.4.7.13/src/core/or/… [warn] Tried connecting to router at 192.0.2.3:80 ID=<none> RSA_ID=2B280B23E1107BB62ABFC40DDCC8824814F80A71, but RSA + ed25519 identity keys were not as expected: wanted 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111 + no ed25519 key but got 2B280B23E1107BB62ABFC40DDCC8824814F80A72 + 1zOHpg+FxqQfi/6jDLtCpHHqBTH8gjYmCKXkus1D5Ko. [warn] Problem bootstrapping. Stuck at 14% (handshake): Handshaking with a relay. (Unexpected identity in router certificate; IDENTITY; count 1; recommendation warn; host 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111 at 192.0.2.3:80)

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txtorcon 23.11.0
by meejah 20 Nov '23

20 Nov '23

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 I'm energized to announce txtorcon 23.11.0 with the following changes: * Fix test-failures on Python 3.12 * Particular GETINFO hanging (https://github.com/meejah/txtorcon/issues/389) (ultra-long lines over 16KiB caused problems in the protocol) * Use built-in `mock` only (https://github.com/jelly) * Remove `incremental` (https://github.com/gdrosos) txtorcon is an implementation of the "control-spec" for Tor using the "Twisted" networking library. This is the library to use if you want to write event-based software (including asyncio; interop is possible) in Python that uses the Tor network as a client or a service (or to integrate Tor support into existing Twisted-using applications). You can download the release from PyPI or GitHub (or of course "pip install txtorcon"): https://pypi.python.org/pypi/txtorcon/23.11.0 https://github.com/meejah/txtorcon/releases/tag/v23.11.0 Releases are also available from the hidden service: http://fjblvrw2jrxnhtg67qpbzi45r7ofojaoo3orzykesly2j3c2m3htapid.onion/txtor… http://fjblvrw2jrxnhtg67qpbzi45r7ofojaoo3orzykesly2j3c2m3htapid.onion/txtor… You can verify the sha256sum of both by running the following 4 lines in a shell wherever you have the files downloaded: cat <<EOF | sha256sum --check c6c4f5ca5e94ed58be70de0f06d06153b7025cf4c6956b3724194a7cd8736904 dist/txtorcon-23.11.0.tar.gz 59ec801a38d6ea3cedc544cfcdb8e6f180b55d51bf9a01224b09f4bf48262f6b dist/txtorcon-23.11.0-py3-none-any.whl EOF thanks, meejah -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQFFBAEBCgAvFiEEnVor1WiOy4id680/wmAoAxKAaacFAmVbDTcRHG1lZWphaEBt ZWVqYWguY2EACgkQwmAoAxKAaafM/wgA4VdkdG6UgY7XiWQSfrjZZby5sszLJWUa 6T2x4PlHMnI6H2GvspU76n8rHwIfoi5MUIpZvqA17YnN2roPvBZYYwThczh9rhs1 2iTh4geeoBoLJyv8yokfy8gkv0AZ4tdfWa4b3AKA7yqoQ5YSK0hCji+m1jfqyY0q P1FCTDZ2cMl8nQ0/KMxtY1Ifg2tXpQi0OXRujPIHCdqQkA5u94WS1pZZBK3qSNJE 1/20vBI38938wDk/oNapHIeyXYVoVL4DAGq0ADMwYm0syoMZx7NES0a6T3UThKMt szmNj8YR+gwifu3/7UAEZbnAyosSgByqHPaFUu40+Z5LzlXaEnwiaA== =bHsG -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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tor-dev November 2023