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Onion Service - Intropoint DoS Defenses
by David Goulet 05 Jul '19

05 Jul '19

Greetings! As some of you know, a bunch of onion services were or are still under heavy DDoS on the network. More specifically, they are bombarded with introduction requests (INTRODUCE2 cells) which forces them to rendezvous for each of them by creating a ton of circuits. This basically leads to a resource exhaustion attack on the service side with its CPU massively used for path selection, opening new circuits and continously handling INTRODUCE2 cells. Unfortunately, our circuit-level flow control does not apply to the service introduction circuit which means that the intro point is allowed, by the Tor protocol, to send an arbitrary large amount of cells down the circuit. This means for the service that even after the DoS has stopped, it would still receive massive amounts of cells because some are either inflight on the circuit or queued at the intro point ready to be sent (towards the service). That being all said, our short-term goal here is to add INTRODUCE2 rate-limiting (similar to the Guard DoS subsystem deployed early last year) *at* the intro point but much simpler. The goal is to soak up the introduction load directly at the intro points which would help reduce the load on the network overall and thus preserve its health. Please have a look at https://trac.torproject.org/15516 for some discussions and ongoing code work. We are at the point where we have a branch that rate limits INTRODUCE2 cells at the intro point but we need to figure out proper values for the rate per second and the burst allowed. One naive approach is to see how much cells an attack can send towards a service. George and I have conducted experiment where with 10 *modified* tor clients bombarding a service at a much faster rate than 1 per-second (what vanilla tor does if asked to connect a lot), we see in 1 minute ~15000 INTRODUCE2 cells at the service. This varies in the thousands depending on different factors but overall that is a good average of our experiment. This means that 15000/60 = 250 cells per second. Considering that this is an absurd amount of INTRODUCE2 cells (maybe?), we can put a rate per second of let say a fifth meaning 50 and a burst of 200. Over the normal 3 intro points a service has, it means 150 introduction per-second are allowed with a burst of 600 in total. Or in other words, 150 clients can reach the service every second up to a burst of 600 at once. This probably will ring alarms bell for very popular services that probably gets 1000+ users a second so please check next section. I'm not that excited about hardcoded network wide values so this is why the next section is more exciting but much more work for us! One step further: we have not really decided yet if this is something we want nor have time to tackle but an idea here would be for a service to inform the intro point, using the ESTABLISH_INTRO cell payload, on the parameters it wants for its DoS defenses. So let say a very popular .onion with OnionBalance and 10 intro points, could tell to its intro points that it wants much higher values for the DoS defenses (or even put it off). However, it doesn't change the initial building block of being able to rate limit at the introduction point. As a second step, we can add this new type of ESTABLISH_INTRO cell. It is always dicy to introduce a new cell since for instance this would leak information to the intro point that the service is ">= version". Thus, this needs to be done with carefully. Time for your thoughts and help! :) Thanks everyone! David -- g6fXJTHx8+aXYB1ZLPzFft/VxRukF1Td5nborX04XM0=

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Proposal 303: When and how to remove support for protocol versions
by Nick Mathewson 05 Jul '19

05 Jul '19

Filename: 303-protover-removal-policy.txt Title: When and how to remove support for protocol versions Author: Nick Mathewson Created: 21 May 2019 Status: Draft 1. Background With proposal 264, added support for "subprotocol versions" -- a means to declare which features are required for participation in the Tor network. We also created a mechanism (refined later in proposal 297) for telling Tor clients and relays that they cannot participate effectively in the Tor network, and they need to shut down. In this document, we describe a policy according to which these decisions should be made in practice. 2. Recommending features (for clients and relays) A subprotocol version SHOULD become recommended soon after all release series that did not provide it become unsupported (within a month or so). For example, the current oldest LTS release series is 0.2.9; when it becomes unsupported in 2020, the oldest supported release series will be 0.3.5. Suppose that 0.2.9 supports a subprotocol Cupcake=1, and that all stable 0.3.5.x versions support Cupcake=1-3. Around one month after the end of 0.2.9 support, Cupcake=3 should become a _recommended_ protocol for clients and relays. Additionally, a feature can become _recommended_ because of security reasons. If we believe that it is a terrible idea to run an old protocol, we can make it _recommended_ for relays or clients or both. We should not do this lightly, since it will be annoying. 3. Requiring features (for relays) We regularly update the directory authorities to require relays to run certain versions of Tor or later. We generally do this after a short outreach campaign to get as many relays as possible to upgrade. We MAY make a feature required for relays one month after every version without it is obsolete and unsupported, though it is better to wait three months if possible. We SHOULD make a feature required for relays within 12 months after every version without it is obsolete and unsupported. 4. Requiring features (for clients) Clients take the longest time to update, and are often the least able to fetch upgrades. Because of this, we should be very careful about making subprotocol versions required on clients, and should only do so for fairly compelling reasons. We SHOULD NOT make a feature required for clients until it has been _recommended_ for clients for at first 9 months. We SHOULD make a feature required for clients if it has been _recommended_ for clients for at least 18 months.

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Per-peer stream isolation for Bitcoin clients
by Jeremy Rand 02 Jul '19

02 Jul '19

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 Hi Tor-Dev, I'm trying to gauge the consensus (or lack thereof) in the Tor development community on whether it's desirable for Bitcoin clients (e.g. Bitcoin Core) to use stream isolation such that each peer is accessed over a different circuit. Some random thoughts on the matter: 1. Bitcoin Core accesses 8 peers by default, so per-peer stream isolation would use 8 circuits instead of 1. 2. Per-peer stream isolation prevents a single exit relay from feeding the user a chain that's not the longest chain, so it's desirable from a Bitcoin security point of view. 3. Per-peer stream isolation would mean more potential for one of the circuits being deanonymizable, via traffic analysis etc. It's not clear to me whether this amount of increased circuits is harmful, or how it compares to other common usage of Tor such as Tor Browser (which uses first-party stream isolation, so a user with a lot of tabs open may very well have 8 or more circuits in use at once). 4. Per-peer stream isolation puts more load on the Tor network. It's not clear to me whether this increased load (8 circuits instead of 1) is so much that it's harmful. 5. Bitcoin Core does do per-peer stream isolation by default. The relevant PR is https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5911 6. Whonix's tor-service-defaults-torrc chooses to disable automatic per-peer stream isolation for Bitcoin's SOCKS port, and states "Makes too many connections to different servers. Should not hurt if they get through the same circuit." No citation was given for either claim. 7. The behavior in Bitcoin Core's PR was ACKed by Isis Lovecruft, and an unspecified Tor developer whom Greg Maxwell talked to. So, it sounds like there is apparently some disagreement between the two Tor devs who ACKed this behavior, and the Whonix devs who decided not to enable it. Curious what the general feeling in the community is. (I understand that Isis no longer is active in Tor, so I'm not CC'ing them. I am CC'ing Patrick from Whonix in case he wants to weigh in.) Cheers, - -- - -Jeremy Rand Lead Application Engineer at Namecoin Mobile email: jeremyrandmobile(a)airmail.cc Mobile OpenPGP: 2158 0643 C13B B40F B0FD 5854 B007 A32D AB44 3D9C Send non-security-critical things to my Mobile with OpenPGP. Please don't send me unencrypted messages. My business email jeremy(a)veclabs.net is having technical issues at the moment. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIzBAEBCgAdFiEEVB3fdzAraEcoBtkSs/LRZXhtZXAFAl0VKAIACgkQs/LRZXht ZXD3rRAAydyiDv2NVU8rPopr+FkTVclNAA3gM3BKjhZH1EGqya54Xr0OdsTR3VUQ gBMz5HiexbFnE7VTysnB6ePP/PpLRlAlTj1zLXFCT90H+s1kj84WpjxNZJaguLIJ zGOQKhqgId9f1pjv7or8DYDrdzT0bfOzKREFM+Yx5TTgPfvxXC9Ug6U1sx5sp7AA jCAZnrjqWSK+IrNnwrayL2vSPByt+djsK2YPLnq13frKMdonMw+IITVOvT9w5LZt I/MQa2UujG5DU0owI0t5XmJ7ZQxehcHdAuqU/BfZ5OQVjCH3QgVNwRjlGPaaag+f y9wMVG0X4cbuvg5x8sar/n8UCR1sDJmlSuN7C6AwE2/e0RU0g67wfTgNcqFlIHta 9t8ORsFUxN6rDtRkbq0FE7xgSYbT9cDtjDFJMhG8oOc0Ibc9EhIJkGETz1amHNUo GFEBAEircjPJ+KZBsHsQGrLUwpiM6zPbPfkVWwA7dTn4peESSed0Yjwawcn2wpiE X2TMzhhXpzTjtqpBcroSDKRMum5z/VksEZ3d2MyfIj/caYVXXxPZYS1DqOGtKxYc uiDCRpL4b/ouJ1FbT1sxHpwTp5e+62XFnfXsoz3Wa9jkrA75kgnnb2kfcjNW/Fq/ 6HgLhasriz4jg2iya9rScuUnmU1Ewa8st0bNDGK83qYHofCdvCg= =1u2L -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Changed Network Team Meeting Times
by teor 30 Jun '19

30 Jun '19

Hi all, We've moved the first network team meeting of each month to Wednesday 2300 UTC. (It used to be Tuesday.) We have also moved the weekly "patch party" to Wednesday 2300 UTC in the other weeks of the month. The regular team meeting time is still the same, Monday 1700 UTC. Here is our meeting schedule for July: * Wednesday 3 July 2300 UTC - Changed Day! * Monday 8 July at 1700 UTC * (In-person meeting 12-14 July) * Monday 22 July 1700 UTC * Monday 29 July 1700 UTC T -- teor ----------------------------------------------------------------------

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tor writen in golang
by liuyihen 30 Jun '19

30 Jun '19

Hi tor-dev@mailing list, I want to know is there somebody has been re-writing tor in golang? or is there a repo have been opened?

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Release: obfs4proxy-0.0.11
by Yawning Angel 20 Jun '19

20 Jun '19

Hello, I just tagged obfs4proxy-0.0.11. The primary changes are an alteration to how the obfs4 transport handles connections after the handshake failed, based on a report and assistance from Sergey Frolov. Tarball/Signature: https://people.torproject.org/~yawning/releases/obfs4proxy/obfs4proxy-0.0.1… https://people.torproject.org/~yawning/releases/obfs4proxy/obfs4proxy-0.0.1… Changes in version 0.0.11 - 2019-06-21: - Update my e-mail address. - Change the obfs4 behavior for handling handshake failure to be more uniform. Thanks to Sergey Frolov for assistance. - Bump the version of the utls fork. Regards, -- Yawning Angel

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Proposal 305: ESTABLISH_INTRO Cell DoS Defense Extension
by David Goulet 20 Jun '19

20 Jun '19

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Shortcomings of the pluggable transports specification?
by Philipp Winter 20 Jun '19

20 Jun '19

We are working on improving Tor's pluggable transports specification: <https://spec.torproject.org/pt-spec> The goal is to make the spec useful to more people and fix issues that have accumulated over the years. For more context, have a look at the following ticket, which we use to coordinate this effort: <https://bugs.torproject.org/29285> Before changing the spec, we need to understand its shortcomings and what issues implementers have run into. For those of you who have experience with the spec -- either Tor's version 1.0 or version 2.1 maintained by pluggabletransports.info -- please let us know: * What version of the PT specification and what library implementation (if any) are you using? * What has your experience been with the PT specification? * How would you improve the specification? Thanks, Philipp

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User Data Exchange with Network Automata (re: Prop 305, ex energy)
by grarpamp 17 Jun '19

17 Jun '19

> And this is really off topic for this list. General Tor energy bits moved here... https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2019-June/045256.html re 305 etc It wouldn't be unusual for an app to pop up some form of captcha, challenge, or data exchange where needed. Some of that model exists in form of onion service authentication config... some helper data that grants access, makes things happen, whether passive or active interrupt. The controller would be the interface. Yet tor currently has no mechanism on platforms to handle such protocols and popups... thus like onion auth, the user has know they need it for something and configure it in advance. Try investigating an ssh-agent like tor tool... preloaded with users Proof-of-*, 2FA, consumables, etc to dole out, even automatically, where needed and permitted.

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Cryptocurrency: Total Energy Analysis - Crypto Uses Less Than Fiat
by grarpamp 17 Jun '19

17 Jun '19

(from tor-dev: PoW DoS defenses Prop 305: INTRO Cell) On 6/16/19, Chelsea Holland Komlo <me(a)chelseakomlo.com> wrote: > Given the significant environmental impact of POW in other distributed > systems (blockchain), we should not implement schemes that solve a > problem for Tor but create problems for people elsewhere (potentially > irreversible environmental damage). > > https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/05/energy-cost-of-mining-bi… One must first understand and enumerate the *entirety of all global energy inputs* going into and making up the legacy fiat currency banking systems, from both Government and Corporate sectors, and its results, before attempting to make any claims that cryptocurrency is "worse" [1]. Such cataloging and analysis requires more work, more data, more actual redpill thought, than just simple hashrate/J/$... so of course people take shortcuts in such articles, as do other people in their pronouncements stemming from them. > Other less-destructive schemes exist to prevent DoS attacks. POW is a > method, not a goal in itself. Taking a step back and examining the full > spectrum of available tools would be better. The needs and model for overlay nets, ie tor, will of course be different than those above. And always interesting where tech various ends up being applied. [1] Hint: Cryptocurrency actually consumes less, and further finally forces inefficiency and other undesired things out of Fiat by displacing it... hopefully faster than it can adapt. Some say that has a value, one that many will be quite happy to sink a bit of premium into if need be.

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