On 22 Feb 2016, at 09:52, Jose Carlos Norte jcarlos.norte@gmail.com wrote:
The gzip compression format used by HTTP if accepted by both server and client, under certain configurations, provides the date of the server that compressed the HTTP Response. This information can be used by a third party to know the time zone where the onion site is hosted. I have written a more in depth explanation about the topic at: http://jcarlosnorte.com/security/2016/02/21/date-leak-gzip-tor.html http://jcarlosnorte.com/security/2016/02/21/date-leak-gzip-tor.html A proof of concept is included, to check if your service is leaking this information through the gzip headers of a compressed HTTP Response. I have decided to share this because is not an obvious miss-configuration that could lead to the leak of information about the physical position of your hidden service. Be careful. Of course, just knowing the timezone of your hidden service server is not enough to know your identity, or your exact server location, but combined with another leaks or other pieces of information, could be dangerous.
Thanks for this report, Jose Carlos.
For completeness, tor itself does not suffer from this issue, even though it uses gzip compression internally to compress directory documents.
Hidden services and clients do not produce or recompress directory documents, so they could never be affected.
And tor authorities use deflateInit2 to initialise compression for votes and consensuses, which zeroes the gzip header.
From the deflateInit2 documentation in zlib.h:
"windowBits can also be greater than 15 for optional gzip encoding. Add 16 to windowBits to write a simple gzip header and trailer around the compressed data instead of a zlib wrapper. The gzip header will have no file name, no extra data, no comment, no modification time (set to zero), no header crc, and the operating system will be set to 255 (unknown). If a gzip stream is being written, strm->adler is a crc32 instead of an adler32."
Tim
Tim Wilson-Brown (teor)
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