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Proposal 220 (revised): Migrate server identity keys to Ed25519
by Nick Mathewson 18 Aug '14

18 Aug '14

I've revised proposal 220 based on commentary from Roger. The biggest changes is tweaking all of the things called "certificates" to make them actually follow the same format to greatest the extent possible. To see diffs, you can use git, or browse the gitweb site at https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/history/HEAD:/proposals/220-ecc-i… Filename: 220-ecc-id-keys.txt Title: Migrate server identity keys to Ed25519 Authors: Nick Mathewson Created: 12 August 2013 Target: 0.2.x.x Status: Draft [Note: This is a draft proposal; I've probably made some important mistakes, and there are parts that need more thinking. I'm publishing it now so that we can do the thinking together.] 0. Introduction In current Tor designs, router identity keys are limited to 1024-bit RSA keys. Clearly, that should change, because RSA doesn't represent a good performance-security tradeoff nowadays, and because 1024-bit RSA is just plain too short. We've already got an improved circuit extension handshake protocol that uses curve25519 in place of RSA1024, and we're using (where supported) P256 ECDHE in our TLS handshakes, but there are more uses of RSA1024 to replace, including: * Router identity keys * TLS link keys * Hidden service keys This proposal describes how we'll migrate away from using 1024-bit RSA in the first two, since they're tightly coupled. Hidden service crypto changes will be complex, and will merit their own proposal. In this proposal, we'll also (incidentally) be extirpating a number of SHA1 usages. 1. Overview When this proposal is implemented, every router will have an Ed25519 identity key in addition to its current RSA1024 public key. Ed25519 (specifically, Ed25519-SHA-512 as described and specified at http://ed25519.cr.yp.to/) is a desirable choice here: it's secure, fast, has small keys and small signatures, is bulletproof in several important ways, and supports fast batch verification. (It isn't quite as fast as RSA1024 when it comes to public key operations, since RSA gets to take advantage of small exponents when generating public keys.) (For reference: In Ed25519 public keys are 32 bytes long, private keys are 64 bytes long, and signatures are 64 bytes long.) To mirror the way that authority identity keys work, we'll fully support keeping Ed25519 identity keys offline; they'll be used to sign long-ish term signing keys, which in turn will do all of the heavy lifting. A signing key will get used to sign the things that RSA1024 identity keys currently sign. 1.1. 'Personalized' signatures Each of the keys introduced here is used to sign more than one kind of document. While these documents should be unambiguous, I'm going to forward-proof the signatures by specifying each signature to be generated, not on the document itself, but on the document prefixed with some distinguishing string. 2. Certificates and Router descriptors. 2.1. Certificates When generating a signing key, we also generate a certificate for it. Unlike the certificates for authorities' signing keys, these certificates need to be sent around frequently, in significant numbers. So we'll choose a compact representation. VERSION [1 Byte] CERT_TYPE [1 Byte] EXPIRATION_DATE [3 Bytes] CERT_KEY_TYPE [1 byte] CERTIFIED_KEY [32 Bytes] EXTENSIONS [variable length, up to length of certificate minus 64 bytes.] SIGNATURE [64 Bytes] The "VERSION" field holds the value [01]. The "CERT_TYPE" field holds a value depending on the type of certificate. (See appendix A.1.) The CERTIFIED_KEY field is an Ed25519 public key if CERT_KEY_TYPE is [01], or a SHA256 hash of some other key type depending on the value of CERT_KEY_TYPE. The EXPIRATION_DATE is a date, given in HOURS since the epoch, after which this certificate isn't valid. (A three-byte field here will work fine until 5797 A.D.) The EXTENSIONS field contains zero or more extensions, each of the format: ExtLength [1 or 2 bytes] ExtType [1 or 2 bytes] ExtData [Length bytes] The ExtLength and ExtType fields can represent values between 0 and 2^15-1, representing values under 128 as "0xxxxxxx" and values over 128 as "1xxxxxxx yyyyyyyy". The meaning of the ExtData field in an extension is type-dependent. It is an error for an extension to be truncated; such a certificate is invalid. Before processing any certificate, parties MUST know which identity key it is supposed to be signed by, and then check the signature. The signature is formed by signing the first N-64 bytes of the certificate prefixed with the string "Tor node signing key certificate v1". 2.2. Basic extensions 2.2.1. Signed-with-ed25519-key extension [type 04] In several places, it's desirable to bundle the key signing a certificate along with the certificate. We do so with this extension. ExtLength = 32 ExtData = An ed25519 key [32 bytes] When this extension is present, it MUST match the key used to sign the certificate. This 2.3. Revoking keys. We also specify a revocation document for revoking a signing key or an identity key. Its format is: FIXED_PREFIX [8 Bytes] VERSION [1 Byte] KEYTYPE [1 Byte] IDENTITY_KEY [32 Bytes] REVOKED_KEY [32 Bytes] PUBLISHED [8 Bytes] REV_EXTENSIONS [variable length, up to length of revocation document minus 64 bytes] SIGNATURE [64 Bytes] FIXED_PREFIX is "REVOKEID" or "REVOKESK". VERSION is [01]. KEYTYPE is [01] for revoking a signing key or [02] for revoking an identity key. REVOKED_KEY is the key being revoked; IDENTITY_KEY is the node's Ed25519 identity key. PUBLISHED is the time that the document was generated, in seconds since the epoch. REV_EXTENSIONS is left for a future version of this document. The SIGNATURE is generated with the same key as in IDENTITY_KEY, and covers the entire revocation, prefixed with "Tor key revocation v1". Using these revocation documents is left for a later specification. 2.4. Managing keys By default, we can keep the easy-to-setup key management properties that Tor has now, so that node operators aren't required to have offline public keys: * When a Tor node starts up with no Ed25519 identity keys, it generates a new identity keypair. * When a Tor node has an Ed25519 identity keypair, and it has no signing key, or its signing key is going to expire within the next 48 hours, it generates a new signing key to last 30 days. But we also support offline identity keys: * When a Tor node starts with an Ed25519 public identity key but no private identity key, it checks whether it has a currently valid certified signing keypair. If it does, it starts. Otherwise, it refuses to start. * If a Tor node's signing key is going to expire soon, it starts warning the user. If it is expired, then the node shuts down. 2.5. Router descriptors We specify the following element that may appear at most once in each router descriptor: "identity-ed25519" SP certificate NL The identity-key and certificate are base64-encoded with terminating =s removed. When this element is present, it MUST appear as the first or second element in the router descriptor. [XXX The rationale here is to allow extracting the identity key and signing key and checking the signature before fully parsing the rest of the document. -NM] The certificate has CERT_TYPE of [04]. It must include a signed-with-ed25519-key extension (see section 2.2.1), so that we can extract the identity key. When an identity-ed25519 element is present, there must also be a "router-signature-ed25519" element. It MUST be the next-to-last element in the descriptor, appearing immediately before the RSA signature. It MUST contain an ed25519 signature of the entire document, from the first character up to but not including the "router-signature-ed25519" element, prefixed with the string "Tor router descriptor signature v1". Its format is: "router-signature-ed25519" SP signature NL Where 'signature' is encoded in base64 with terminating =s removed. The signing key in the certificate MUST be the one used to sign the document. Note that these keys cross-certify as follows: the ed25519 identity key signs the ed25519 signing key in the certificate. The ed25519 signing key signs itself and the ed25519 identity key and the RSA identity key as part of signing the descriptor. And the RSA identity key also signs all three keys as part of signing the descriptor. 2.5.1. Checking descriptor signatures. Current versions of Tor will handle these new formats by ignoring the new fields, and not checking any ed25519 information. New versions of Tor will have a flag that tells them whether to check ed25519 information. When it is set, they must check: * All RSA information and signatures that Tor implementations currently check. * If the identity-ed25519 line is present, it must be well-formed, and the certificate must be well-formed and correctly signed, and there must be a valid router-signature-ed25519 signature. * If we require an ed25519 key for this node (see 3.1 below), the ed25519 key must be present. Authorities and directory caches will have this flag always-on. For clients, it will be controlled by a torrc option and consensus option, to be set to "always-on" in the future once enough clients support it. 2.5.2. Extra-info documents Extra-info documents now include "identity-ed25519" and "router-signature-ed25519" fields in the same positions in which they appear in router descriptors. Additionally, we add the base64-encoded, =-stripped SHA256 digest of a node's extra-info document field to the extra-info-digest line in the router descriptor. (All versions of Tor that recognize this line allow an extra field there.) 2.5.3. A note on signature verification Here and elsewhere, we're receiving a certificate and a document signed with the key certified by that certificate in the same step. This is a fine time to use the batch signature checking capability of Ed25519, so that we can check both signatures at once without (much) additional overhead over checking a single signature. 3. Consensus documents and authority operation 3.1. Handling router identity at the authority When receiving router descriptors, authorities must track mappings between RSA and Ed25519 keys. Rule 1: Once an authority has seen an Ed25519 identity key and an RSA identity key together on the same (valid) descriptor, it should no longer accept any descriptor signed by that RSA key with a different Ed25519 key, or that Ed25519 key with a different RSA key. Rule 2: Once an authority has seen an Ed25519 identity key and an RSA identity key on the same descriptor, it should no longer accept any descriptor signed by that RSA key unless it also has that Ed25519 key. These rules together should enforce the property that, even if an attacker manages to steal or factor a node's RSA identity key, the attacker can't impersonate that node to the authorities, even when that node is identified by its RSA key. Enforcement of Rule 1 should be advisory-only for a little while (a release or two) while node operators get experience having Ed25519 keys, in case there are any bugs that cause or force identity key replacement. Enforcement of Rule 2 should be advisory-only for little while, so that node operators can try 0.2.5 but downgrade to 0.2.4 without being de-listed from the consensus. [XXX I could specify a way to do a signed "I'm downgrading for a while!" statement, and kludge some code back into 0.2.4.x to better support that?] 3.2. Formats Vote and microdescriptor documents now contain an optional "id" field for each routerstatus section. Its format is: "id" SP "ed25519" SP ed25519-identity NL where ed25519-identity is base64-encoded, with trailing = characters omitted. In vote documents, it may be replaced by the format: "id" SP "ed25519" SP "none" NL which indicates that the node does not have an ed25519 identity. (In a microdescriptor, a lack of "id" line means that the node has no ed25519 identity.) [XXXX Should the id entries in consensuses go into microdescriptors instead? I think perhaps so. -NM] A vote or consensus document is ill-formed if it includes the same ed25519 identity key twice. 3.3. Generating votes An authority should pick which descriptor to choose for a node as before, and include the ed25519 identity key for the descriptor if it's present. As a transition, before Rule 1 and Rule 2 in 3.1 are fully enforced, authorities need a way to deal with the possibility that there might be two nodes with the same ed25519 key but different RSA keys. In that case, it votes for the one with the most recent publication date. (The existing rules already prevent an authority from voting for two servers with the same RSA identity key.) 3.4. Generating a consensus from votes This proposal requires a new consensus vote method. When we deploy it, we'll pick the next available vote method in sequence to use for this. When the new consensus method is in use, we must choose nodes first by ECC key, then by RSA key. First, for every {ECC identity key, RSA identity key} pair listed by over half of the voting authorities, list it, unless some other RSA identity key digest is listed more popularly for the ECC key. Break ties in favor of low RSA digests. Treat all routerstatus entries that mention this <ECC,RSA> pair as being for the same router, and all routerstatus entries that mention the same RSA key with an unspecified ECC key as being for the same router. Then, for every node that has previously not been listed, perform the current routerstatus algorithm: listing a node if it has been listed by at least N/2 voting authorities, and treating all routerstatuses containing the same identity as the same router. In other words: Let Entries = [] for each ECC ID listed by any voter: Find the RSA key associated with that ECC ID by the most voters, breaking ties in favor of low RSA keys. If that ECC ID and RSA key ID are listed by > N/2 voting authorities: Add the consensus of the routerstatus entries for those voters, along with the routerstatus entry for every voter that included that RSA key with no ECC key, to Entries. Include the ECC ID in the consensus. For each RSA key listed by any voter: If that RSA key is already in Entries, skip it. If the RSA key is listed by > N/2 voting authorities: Add the consensus of the routerstatus entries for those voters to Entries. Do not include an ECC key in the consensus. [XXX Think about this even more.] 4. The link protocol 4.1. Overview of the status quo This section won't make much sense unless you grok the v3 link protocol as described in tor-spec.txt, first proposed in proposal 195. So let's review. In the v3 link protocol, the client completes a TLS handshake with the server, in which the server uses an arbitrary certificate signed with an RSA key. The client then sends a VERSIONS cell. The server replies with a VERSIONS cell to negotiate version 3 or higher. The server also sends a CERTS cell and an AUTH_CHALLENGE cell and a NETINFO cell. The CERTS cell from the server contains a set of one or more certificates that authenticate the RSA key used in the TLS handshake. (Right now there's one self-signed RSA identity key certificate, and one certificate signing the RSA link key with the identity key. These certificates are X509.) Having received a CERTS cell, the client has enough information to authenticate the server. At this point, the client may send a NETINFO cell to finish the handshake. But if the client wants to authenticate as well, it can send a CERTS cell and an AUTENTICATE cell. The client's CERTS cell also contains certs of the same general kinds as the server's key file: a self-signed identity certificate, and an authentication certificate signed with the identity key. The AUTHENTICATE cell contains a signature of various fields, including the contents of the AUTH_CHALLENGE which the server sent cell, using the client's authentication key. These cells allow the client to authenticate to the server. 4.2. Link protocol changes for ECC ID keys We add four new CertType values for use in CERTS cells: 4: Ed25519 signing key 5: Link key certificate certified by Ed25519 signing key 6: Ed25519 TLS authentication key certified by Ed25519 signing key 7: RSA cross-certificate for Ed25519 identity key These correspond to types used in the CERT_TYPE field of the certificates. The content of certificate type [04] (Ed25519 signing key) is as in section 2.5 above, containing an identity key and the signing key, both signed by the identity key. Certificate type [05] (Link certificate signed with Ed25519 signing key) contains a SHA256 digest of the X.509 link certificate used on the TLS connection in its key field; it is signed with the signing key. Certificate type [06] (Ed25519 TLS authentication signed with Ed25519 signing key) has the signing key used to sign the AUTHENTICATE cell described later in this section. Certificate type [07] (Cross-certification of Ed25519 identity with RSA key) contains the following data: ED25519_KEY [32 bytes] EXPIRATION_DATE [4 bytes] SIGNATURE [128 bytes] Here, the Ed25519 identity key is signed with router's RSA identity key, to indicate that authenticating with a key certified by the Ed25519 key counts as certifying with RSA identity key. (The signature is computed on the SHA256 hash of the non-signature parts of the certificate, prefixed with the string "Tor TLS RSA/Ed25519 cross-certificate".) (There's no reason to have a corresponding Ed25519-signed-RSA-key certificate here, since we do not treat authenticating with an RSA key as proving ownership of the Ed25519 identity.) Relays with Ed25519 keys should always send these certificate types in addition to their other certificate types. Non-bridge relays with Ed25519 keys should generate TLS link keys of appropriate strength, so that the certificate chain from the Ed25519 key to the link key is strong enough. We add a new authentication type for AUTHENTICATE cells: "Ed25519-TLSSecret", with AuthType value 2. Its format is the same as "RSA-SHA256-TLSSecret", except that the CID and SID fields support more key types; some strings are different, and the signature is performed with Ed25519 using the authentication key from a type-6 cert. Clients can send this AUTHENTICATE type if the server lists it in its AUTH_CHALLENGE cell. Modified values and new fields below are marked with asterisks. TYPE: The characters "AUTH0002"* [8 octets] CID: A SHA256 hash of the initiator's RSA1024 identity key [32 octets] SID: A SHA256 hash of the responder's RSA1024 identity key [32 octets] *CID_ED: The initiator's Ed25519 identity key [32 octets] *SID_ED: The responder's Ed25519 identity key, or all-zero. [32 octets] SLOG: A SHA256 hash of all bytes sent from the responder to the initiator as part of the negotiation up to and including the AUTH_CHALLENGE cell; that is, the VERSIONS cell, the CERTS cell, the AUTH_CHALLENGE cell, and any padding cells. [32 octets] CLOG: A SHA256 hash of all bytes sent from the initiator to the responder as part of the negotiation so far; that is, the VERSIONS cell and the CERTS cell and any padding cells. [32 octets] SCERT: A SHA256 hash of the responder's TLS link certificate. [32 octets] TLSSECRETS: A SHA256 HMAC, using the TLS master secret as the secret key, of the following: - client_random, as sent in the TLS Client Hello - server_random, as sent in the TLS Server Hello - the NUL terminated ASCII string: "Tor V3 handshake TLS cross-certification with Ed25519"* [32 octets] RAND: A 24 byte value, randomly chosen by the initiator. [24 octets] *SIG: A signature of all previous fields using the initiator's Ed25519 authentication flags. [variable length] If you've got a consensus that lists an ECC key for a node, but the node doesn't give you an ECC key, then refuse this connection. 5. The extend protocol We add a new NSPEC node specifier for use in EXTEND2 cells, with LSTYPE value [03]. Its length must be 32 bytes; its content is the Ed25519 identity key of the target node. Clients should use this type only when: * They know an Ed25519 identity key for the destination node. * The source node supports EXTEND2 cells * A torrc option is set, _or_ a consensus value is set. We'll leave the consensus value off for a while until more clients support this, and then turn it on. When picking a channel for a circuit, if this NSPEC value is provided, then the RSA identity *and* the Ed25519 identity must match. If we have a channel with a given Ed25519 ID and RSA identity, and we have a request for that Ed25519 ID and a different RSA identity, we do not attempt to make another connection: we just fail and DESTROY the circuit. If we receive an EXTEND or EXTEND2 request for a node listed in the consensus, but that EXTEND/EXTEND2 request does not include an Ed25519 identity key, the node SHOULD treat the connection as failed if the Ed25519 identity key it receives does not match the one in the consensus. 6. Naming nodes in the interface Anywhere in the interface that takes an $identity should be able to take an ECC identity too. ECC identities are case-sensitive base64 encodings of Ed25519 identity keys. You can use $ to indicate them as well; we distinguish RSA identity digests by length. When we need to indicate an Ed25519 identity key in a hostname format (as in a .exit address), we use the lowercased version of the name, and perform a case-insensitive match. (This loses us a little less than one bit per byte of name, leaving plenty of bits to make sure we choose the right node.) Nodes must not list Ed25519 identities in their family lines; clients and authorities must not honor them there. (Doing so would make different clients change paths differently in a possibly manipulatable way.) Clients shouldn't accept .exit addresses with Ed25519 names on SOCKS or DNS ports by default, even when AllowDotExit is set. We can add another option for them later if there's a good reason to have this. We need an identity-to-node map for ECC identity and for RSA identity. The controller interface will need to accept and report Ed25519 identity keys as well as (or instead of) RSA identity keys. That's a separate proposal, though. 7. Hidden service changes out of scope Hidden services need to be able to identify nodes by ECC keys, just as they will need to include ntor keys as well as TAP keys. Not just yet though. This needs to be part of a bigger hidden service revamping strategy. 8. Proposed migration steps Once a few versions have shipped with Ed25519 key support, turn on "Rule 1" on the authorities. (Don't allow an Ed25519<->RSA pairing to change.) Once the release with these changes is in beta or rc, turn on the consensus option for everyone who receives descriptors with Ed25519 identity keys to check them. Once the release with these changes is in beta or rc, turn on the consensus option for clients to generate EXTEND2 requests with Ed25519 identity keys. Once the release with these changes has been stable for a month or two, turn on "Rule 2" on authorities. (Don't allow nodes that have advertised an Ed25519 key to stop.) 9. Future proposals * Ed25519 identity support on the controller interface * Supporting nodes without RSA keys * Remove support for nodes without Ed25519 keys * Ed25519 support for hidden services * Bridge identity support. * Ed25519-aware family support A.1. List of certificate types The values marked with asterisks are not types corresponding to the certificate format of section 2.1. Instead, they are reserved for RSA-signed certificates to avoid conflicts between the certificate type enumeration of the CERTS cell and the certificate type enumeration of in our Ed25519 certificates. **[00],[01],[02],[03] - Reserved to avoid conflict with types used in CERTS cells. [04] - signing a signing key with an identity key (Section 2.5) [05] - TLS link certificate signed with ed25519 signing key (Section 4.2) [06] - Ed25519 authentication key signed with ed25519 signing key (Section 4.2) **[07] - reserved for RSA identity cross-certification (Section 4.2) A.2. List of extension types [01] - signed-with-ed25519-key (section 2.2.1) A.3. List of signature prefixes We describe various documents as being signed with a prefix. Here are those prefixes: "Tor router descriptor signature v1" (section 2.5) "Tor node signing key certificate v1" (section 2.1) A.4. List of certified key types [01] ed25519 key [02] SHA256 hash of an RSA key [03] SHA256 hash of an X.509 certificate A.5. Reserved numbers We need a new consensus algorithm number to encompass checking ed25519 keys and putting them in microdescriptors. We need new CertType values for use in CERTS cells. We reserved in section 4.2. 4: Ed25519 signing key 5: Link key certificate certified by Ed25519 signing key 6: TLS authentication key certified by Ed25519 signing key 7: RSA cross-certificate for Ed25519 identity key

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PKCS#1 ASN.1 Public Key Encoding
by Gareth Owen 17 Aug '14

17 Aug '14

Hi all I wonder if someone might be able to help me with the above. I understand, that to generate the digest, the PK must be encoded in PKCS#1 format. And further to this, the public keys in the router descriptors are NOT in PKCS#1 format, but plain ASN.1. I'm trying to generate the fingerprint given just the pubilc key in Java and after almost a whole day I'm about to give up. Does anyone have a sample PKCS#1 encoded public key that is used immediately before SHA-1 to generate the fingerprint? e.g. a hex string is what I'm after. It seems there are subtle ways that an PKCS#1 can vary while encoding the same information which affects the hash, Java seems to be doing it one way, OpenSSL another, an example on stack overflow adds an extra field, etc. Many thanks Gareth

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Re: [tor-dev] Decentralized VOIP over Tor
by terryz＠Safe-mail.net 17 Aug '14

17 Aug '14

I looked at Ostel. Can Ostel be routed over Tor or is there another way to get anonymity using Ostel? I said decentralized VOIP because no central servers would be managing the communications. Any Tor node could possibly be a VOIP server. The network data would have to be continually distributed throughout Tor. Also I was thinking about an option for a user to generate and use their own AES keys via air gap or Diffie–Hellman. I'm interested in this because there's way too many good people hurt by the eavesdropping on telecommunication networks. Thanks, --TZ -------- Original Message -------- From: Jordan <jordannh(a)sent.com> To: tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org Cc: terryz(a)safe-mail.net Subject: Re: [tor-dev] Decentralized VOIP over Tor Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 18:43:22 -0700

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On picking Introduction Points in Next Generation Hidden Services
by George Kadianakis 17 Aug '14

17 Aug '14

One missing piece of rend-spec-ng.txt [0] is a section on how HSes should pick their Introduction Points (IPs). There are three main questions here: - How many IPs should an HS have? - Which relays can be IPs? - What's the lifetime of an IP? ==Introduction Points attacks== Before exploring these questions it's a good idea to state a rough threat model for IPs. First, let's get a visual taste, here is how IPs work in the current HS protocol: https://people.torproject.org/~asn/hs/ip_placement_currently.jpg (number of IPs reduced to 2 to make it more readable) As you can see, IPs are in a good position to conduct any of the following attacks: a) IPs can count the number of introductions for a subset of clients (i.e. in the figure above, IP_1 would be able to count introductions from the clients above it). Since clients pick IPs uniformly at random, it's not hard to extrapolate from that to the total number of introductions. b) IPs have presense information about the HS. That is, they know whether the HS is up or down at a given time since they have a long-term stable circuit to it. FWIW, regular clients also have this ability by continuously "pinging" the HS and noticing when it's down. And, of course, an attacker who controls all the IPs of an HS can trivially DoS the HS (till the HS refreshes its IPs). Furthermore, as part of the Next Generation HSes initiative [0], we are considering enhancing the availability of HSes by allowing multiple nodes per Hidden Service. A plausible idea for achieving that is to allow multiple IP circuits per Introduction Point, as explained in [tor-dev] by Christopher Baines [1]. This means that IPs would work like this: https://people.torproject.org/~asn/hs/ip_placement_scaling.jpg where HS_1, HS_2 and HS_3 are the various nodes of the HS. This allows the IPs to launch the following attacks: a) IPs can learn the number of nodes of an HS, by counting the number of IP circuits on them. Also, the IPs can learn the prsense of the nodes of an HS, by looking at the state of their circuit. b) IPs can choose which HS node will receive traffic. ==How many IPs should an HS have?== Now let's investigate how many IPs an HS should have. The current situation is that HSes attempt to estimate their own popularity [2], and then they launch a number of IPs between 3 and 10 depending on how popular they think they are. FWIW, we don't really understand whether the formula works properly [3]. There are a few options for the future here: a) Fix the formula and keep number of IPs dynamic based on the popularity of the HS. This is not a bad idea. However, we should make sure that from the number of IPs you can't easily derive the number of clients of the HS. Also we should make sure that the formula works properly. b) Have a static amount of IPs per HS. For example '5' of them. I'm not sure what kind of calculations we need to do to find the right constant here (same for the (a) option). c) Have a static amount of IPs per HS, but also allow this to be configurable by the HS operator. The idea here is that popular HSes can pump up the number of IPs to make the service more reachable. It's worth noting that HSes who do so will stand out as manually configured; not sure if any other partition attacks can happen here. Also, there is also the danger of all HS operators thinking they are special and pumping the number of IPs to 42. Generally, we want to have a healthy amount of IPs (so that they don't get DoSed, and that requests get load balanced nicely), but also not too many because every HS having many IP circuits will put a load to the network (especially with services like Torchat where each client is an HS), and also because we want to avoid too many nodes becoming our IPs over time (more on this below). ==Which relays can be IPs?== This seems to be the easiest question here and Tor is currently handling it well by only restricting IPs to be Stable nodes [4]. This means that with the current network, we have about 4000 possible IPs to choose from [5]. This makes sense since we want to maximize the set of possible IPs, but we also want them to be stable to decrease their natural churn. ==What's the lifetime of an IP?== Another hard question: How long should we keep IPs for? Currently, Tor keeps IPs for a random time between 18 to 24 hours [6]. This seems like too short of a period if we actually want to protect against adversarial nodes ever becoming our IPs: Consider an HS with 5 IPs that rotates them every 24 hours, in only two months it will use 300 nodes as IPs plus the natural churn (which is not negligible at all). With that in mind we need to look at all the possible attacks that IPs could launch and decide whether they should be short-lived or long-lived. For example, waldo in a related thread [7] [8] asks for short-lived IPs, but recent entry guard research has shown that making guards more long-lived is actually beneficial for security [9]. I'm personally leaning towards more long-lived IPs but I still don't know what our constants should be. I could see anything from a week, to a month, to 5 months as reasonable IP lifetimes. We also need to look at INTRO_POINT_LIFETIME_INTRODUCTIONS, since apparently in the current code, IPs will expire on their own if they perform more than 16384 introductions. ==Conclusion== I hope that this thread serves as a good start on discussing Introduction Point security. After we take some decisions, we will need to write them down as a proposal and incorporate them in rend-spec-ng.txt. Also, this thread does not explore other IP matters, like how many HS nodes should correspond to each IP if we go ahead with the scaling ideas [10]. I decided to not include this in the discussion, so that we keep it simple and also so that we don't focus on a particular scaling scheme. References: [0]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/224-rend-spe… [1]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-April/006788.html [2]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/blob/ab3d5c049032651a9c9164262f9a8f81… [3]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8950 [4]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/blob/bb68c731b897a967a4b7eb138728fa07… [5]: https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html#relayflags [6]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/blob/bb68c731b897a967a4b7eb138728fa07… https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/blob/bb68c731b897a967a4b7eb138728fa07… [7]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-May/006815.html [8]: waldo also mentions an IP guard discovery attack in another reply of his: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-May/006843.html However, I'm not sure if it's actually doable, since I think that HSes will discard an IP that has failed a circuit. We need to look into this more seriously. [9]: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/improving-tors-anonymity-changing-guard-pa… [10]:https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-October/005615.html https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-October/005683.html

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Orbot & Orfox - GSoC bi-weekly report 6
by Amogh Pradeep 17 Aug '14

17 Aug '14

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Status Report 6 August 17th, 2014. So the past couple of weeks have been a little more hectic than usual, but these are the things that I got to work on: 1) Continuing work on fixing leak: On the Mozilla side, I had a long discussion with snorp and rnewman, they seem to have an idea to solve proxying everything through the added proxy settings but this is going to be one massive bug, so I haven't been able to land it yet. Bugs are http://bugzil.la/942652, http://bugzil.la/942653 and http://bugzil.la/942654. Fixing the first two should solve the dns leak. 2) Temporary loadFavicon fix: As you will be able to see my changes at https://github.com/amoghbl1/gecko-dev/commit/4baa2111b7d8a90af5b7bb787cc9d5… , I have a temporary fix for this, but hopefully this won't be necessary after the above mentioned bugs are fixed. 3) Getting Orfox built on the guardian projects build server: Hopefully this will be done before Monday, although all the code for the app is there, if we could provide the apk officially before hard pencils down, it would be nicer. This has been one great summer for me, I've had loads of fun, learned a lot and met some amazing people. I thank everyone for their support and look forward to continuing working with you guys. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJT8KzvAAoJELm/SSKdtjUkrS8IAIrgJYhvdoa6+7HGfHPqu0cq ocQX8Hd67hXwHrtGHmmdS3c7aCOyV4K0g/aGi4WTVbFRqd+tFzHNK9zTKYpUvXXP wfuORN/SKWCnjLrmjQ6ZXks1+mq7lnaTxSAPYo4GCJj6nTbDzDZryHlHncxMQheA VoU+0JV9bg7OAYpLDaF/4/TPSqG1KE5H5Ae633dXBt0/dmMhFmhNtfJdbNrlilIz UleRhERZe5h94Bz6QYJtCeD0zOdnHxI0udT73c7MYCLTiS7SxFssZYuUiE1grpHl GgVvnR8vfwFCgz7O6WLven+bfOMGZV0ZJZCIPopyZ7HXw034WmTgKLbLQl2H1cM= =ymdp -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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GSoC final progress update (Stegotorus)
by Noah Rahman 17 Aug '14

17 Aug '14

The following tickets were largely achieved (last is in process of debugging) - adding config file (see branch https://github.com/TheTorProject/stegotorus/tree/f--modus-operandi) - adding elligator handshake ( https://github.com/TheTorProject/stegotorus/tree/f--circuit-handshake) [0] - moving remaining stegs over to class-based structure (see note (1) below) (https://github.com/TheTorProject/stegotorus/tree/f--file-stegize-swf-js-pdf ) The following are "on deck" and I intend to work on them after GSoC code submission date of August 22. - SOCKS proxy over wire from Tor (see https://github.com/SRI-CSL/stegotorus/commit/2d4ac59b8112611a7b63a1c5b15dfb… and https://github.com/SRI-CSL/stegotorus/commit/c799f30249c5e1dfbcc1adfe68f6bd… ) - adding SRI code into Tor fork (such as new JSON steg) - this was simply not anywhere near ready in time for the summer, but now has TBB and gitian ready to go - making transparent proxy robust (as security measure in case stegotorus server is probed) [0] this needs one last check for out of order packets. [1] I was hypothesizing that new larger default buffer size or excessive pointer casting was causing performance issues, but perusal of JavaScript patch via valgrind revealed memory leaks in the decompression methods of several steg mod classes. I am in the process of addressing this. This causes intermittent, not consistent failures, so unit tests would not consistently catch this.

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Re: [tor-dev] Decentralized VOIP (or video chat) over Tor
by terryz＠Safe-mail.net 16 Aug '14

16 Aug '14

FreeNote's overview is almost the same as what I'm thinking. I've used GTK and GStreamer for Video in the past and implemented mobile and desktop IPTV applications using Qt, SDL, Ogg, Theora, and Vorbis. This VOIP over Tor idea came to mind after developing a prototype VOIP application using Qt with custom protocols and encryption. The users generated their own AES keys and added them to the VOIP client through the user-interface. The VOIP server didn't do any encryption/decryption only the client and only public-key information was allowed to be transmitted to peers, but the packets did go through central servers. It wasn't decentralized and no anonymity was in the design. It would be nice to have this work over Tor. I would like to focus on this task if possible. --TZ -------- Original Message -------- From: Griffin Boyce <griffin(a)cryptolab.net> Apparently from: tor-dev-bounces(a)lists.torproject.org To: tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org Subject: Re: [tor-dev] Decentralized VOIP (or video chat) over Tor Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 22:14:09 -0400 > > This is similar, though not *quite* the same. A while back ioerror > released FreeNote[1], which makes it easier to broadcast audio and video > on a hidden service. This is a pretty cool idea and works pretty well. > AND it should be pointed out that two one-way conversations can be a > two-way conversation by virtue of just sharing the links over OTR [2]. > > Scott Ainslie and I discussed the possibility of taking that basic > two-way conversation hidden service concept and making a GUI for it with > Glade+GTK. Unfortunately, neither of us really have the time or > expertise for this endeavor. I got as far as wireframing some ideas > before going face-first into developing a more time-sensitive project > [3]. I'd love it if someone actually did this and released their > prototype as free software. There are way too many issues with > centralized services like Skype and Google Hangouts.[4] > > best, > Griffin > > > [1] https://github.com/ioerror/freenote > [2] Of course, if someone shares the links further, there can be privacy > issues. > [3] Satori: https://github.com/glamrock/Satori > [4] and jitsi never recognizes my fucking microphones =/ > > On 2014-08-15 21:43, Jordan wrote: > > Hi, terryz, > > > > Thanks for the idea! Today I was actually wondering if *video* were > > possible, > > too. :-D > > > > Guardian project has [Ostel](https://guardianproject.info/apps/ostel/). > > Is > > that what you're wanting? If not, was there a feature you were wanting > > from > > Ostel or another application that has features that Ostel doesn't? > > > > As for "decentralized," I think the whole point of tor is that tor > > itself is > > decentralized. Check out [Running a relay] > > (https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en) to see how this > > works. > > > > Again, thanks for the input! :-D > > > > On Friday, August 15, 2014 05:53:44 PM terryz(a)Safe-mail.net wrote: > >> Hi, > >> > >> I'm interested an anonymous decentralized VOIP network on Tor. All > >> traffic > >> routed through Tor. Every Tor user being an optional server for PTT or > >> Continuous Speech. > >> > >> How feasible does this sound? > >> > >> > >> --TZ > >> _______________________________________________ > >> tor-dev mailing list > >> tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org > >> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev > > > > _______________________________________________ > > tor-dev mailing list > > tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org > > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev > _______________________________________________ > tor-dev mailing list > tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev

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txtorcon 0.11.0
by meejah 16 Aug '14

16 Aug '14

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 txtorcon 0.11.0 is now released. This adds a few API improvements: * launch_tor() allows access to stdout, stderr in real-time and control whether we kill Tor on and stderr output. See issue #79. * Warning about ``build_circuit`` being called without a guard first is now optional (default is still warn) (from arlolra) * available_tcp_port() now in util (from arlolra) * TorState now has a .routers_by_hash member (from arlolra) You can download the release from PyPI or GitHub (or of course "pip install txtorcon"): https://pypi.python.org/pypi/txtorcon/0.11.0 https://github.com/meejah/txtorcon/releases/tag/v0.11.0 sha256sum reports: 5efb7ba4faf698e68daea3d8711ce0ecfd8b95501cbec00b2093dd99f72dc8cc txtorcon-0.11.0-py2-none-any.whl aa206ab8a31053fd34798659c3d4cd7354a3e6872a86065c55098866df3dcaca txtorcon-0.11.0-py2-none-any.whl.asc ecb7cc8ee002ead5481c17fd62576521862e93081c58d7118f53cf3c8817f857 txtorcon-0.11.0.tar.gz 76ee6983269347d475ff4df9aefb7c43ddd25d24dd67c4e3293f5c8557377652 txtorcon-0.11.0.tar.gz.asc txtorcon 0.10.1 is in Debian, and no doubt this release will migrate there quickly as usual (thanks to Lunar^) thanks, meejah -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJT7vo4AAoJEMJgKAMSgGmnzjsH/36wtSA2Cb1coSuK+5hGNIGa flmGETgEOo4mHRCnSLQdO5JrXAKR9zeEt9tT9IfCTO1kRy4Q5cqzE569RhPsciBn 1g3fMlgXewjJuXx1atefO1sbqQgK74TsIqxkGnK85LEUOcqIcW71JT8lI6CDn3xg LymqLLhbC28uYLot+Y0/KPAME7MAlgugny5Me2sGzey1aKfjZhPXQ6gRJsGVlPjQ qhMD6ck9Xe+QZNkE4udzEzNkvA7Og/HJdwwi3yC/ENKcWKit/9PeKvmttVjyQ9Aj KGeN2CMA5jTHHznvohvAKgeUnkDDR4tqpcoKdJZjCVg9yAaaiNoPw2wj/3O3tTw= =elqw -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Decentralized VOIP over Tor
by terryz＠Safe-mail.net 16 Aug '14

16 Aug '14

Hi, I'm interested an anonymous decentralized VOIP network on Tor. All traffic routed through Tor. Every Tor user being an optional server for PTT or Continuous Speech. How feasible does this sound? --TZ

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Guard nodes and network down events
by George Kadianakis 15 Aug '14

15 Aug '14

Hello friends :) This is a post to discuss how Tor should treat its entry guards when its network goes down. This is part of ticket #12595 [0] which aims to design better interfaces and data structures for entry guards. This thread investigates what should happen when the network goes down and Tor's connection to a guard fails. How should Tor recognize that and connect back to that guard when the network goes up again? I recently sent an email to tor-dev [1] which explains Tor's current behavior and its problems. tl;dr there are edge cases [2] where Tor will not detect the "network back up" event and will connect to low priority guards instead of connecting to its primary guards. The fundamental issue here is that Tor does not have a primitive that detects whether the network is up or down, since any such primitive stands out to a network attacker [3]. This means that when Tor fails to connect to an entry guard, Tor can never be sure whether the guard was actually down or whether the network is down, and that complicates its algorithm significantly. In #12595, I laid down a few different ways that Tor could improve its current "network down" entry guard algorithm [4]. After thinking some more, I've been leaning towards algorithm (a), which is: Everytime we manage to connect to a guard, if it's not the top guard in our list, mark all previous guards as retriable and try again from the top. For me, this seems like the most complete way of ensuring that the guards in the top of the list are always going to get a fair hearing even if the network was down when they were first probed. However, that algorithm is not without its problems. Here are some notes: - This algorithm suffers from an infinite loop. The naive version suffers from an obvious infinite loop if the first guards in our list are actually down. To protect against that, we will probably need to rewrite the algorithm to: Everytime we manage to connect to a guard, if it's not the top guard in our list, mark all previous guards as retriable and try again from the top: this time pick whichever guard we can connect to even if it's not the top one. - This algorithm is not actually robust. If we wanted to design a truly robust algorithm, it would have to be robust even against adversarial "network down" events. That is, the algorithm would need to work well even if you imagine the network as an "on"/"off" switch that the adversary can toggle at will. Here is how that algorithm can fail against such an adversary: 1) Tor starts up. Adversary switches network off. 2) Tor starts going through guards and fails to connect to them. 3) Adversary switches network on. 4) Tor detects "network up" event, marks all guards as up and goes from the top. 5) Adversary switches network off. 6) Tor starts going through guards and fails to connect to them. 7) Adversary switches network on, and Tor establishes a circuit to the guard that it was currently walking over. If the adversary is a LAN adversary, she learns the order of the guards in Tor's list, so she can basically choose whichever guard she wants. FWIW, whether such an adversary is realistic is up for debate. - This algorithm is not very elegant. - This algorithm might make guard fingerprinting worse. Imagine that the first 2 guards in your list are actually down. Everytime Tor detects a "network up" event, it will attempt to connect to those 2 dead guards before connecting to the third guard which is up. . A LAN/WAN adversary will be able to see those failed connections and the third successful connection, which form a nice tight guard fingerprinting vector (similar to #10969). And that's all folks. I'm looking forward to some feedback on the proposed algorithms as well as improvements and suggestions. PS: I think that Tor was doing a trick with UDP to learn its public IP address or something. I need to read up on that trick, and see if it can be used to build a "network up" primitive. [0]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12595 [1]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-June/007042.html [2]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12450 [3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3764291/checking-network-connection https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12595#comment:6 [4]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12595#comment:5

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