[tor-bugs] #15008 [Tor]: Design an opt-in Hidden Service Public Directory Submission system

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#15008: Design an opt-in Hidden Service Public Directory Submission system
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 Reporter:  asn              |          Owner:
     Type:  defect           |         Status:  new
 Priority:  normal           |      Milestone:  Tor: 0.2.???
Component:  Tor              |        Version:
 Keywords:  tor-hs SponsorR  |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:                   |         Points:
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 Hidden services are not as visible as the normal Internet. There are
 interesting hidden services out there that no one knows about, not even
 search engines like ahmia. Also, unlike the real internet, the onion space
 is not very well connected so search engine crawlers have a hard time
 harvesting more addresses.

 We've been discussing adding some kind of system that Hidden Services can
 use and it will automatically publish their onion address for the whole
 world to see. This fits to the threat model of Facebook or of blog sites,
 and we should '''make sure''' that it never happens to our private SSH
 hidden services etc.

 This ticket is about designing such a system. I2P has been doing something
 very similar, apparently with good success and with no drama. See section
 ''Incoming Subscriptions and Merging'' of
 https://geti2p.net/en/docs/naming.  Furthermore, their system is basically
 a FIFO petname system, where people can register their public keys and
 match them with a human memorable name.

 There are many questions here:

 - Should this be a little-t-tor-feature? Sebastian feels that there is too
 much complexity in Tor already and adding features like this only
 intensifies it. He suggested to make this a controller feature, and just
 have the controller submit our descriptor to a directory. Unfortunately,
 there is no real controller for hidden services, since TBB is not in the
 picture, and arm does not work with hidden services. Maybe we could make
 this a feature of txtorcon or stem?

  special pointed out that this feature is not much better than hidden
 service operators manually submitting their URL to ahmia through the web
 UI. The problem is that operators might not know of ahmia. A suggestion
 here was to improve hidden service operator education, and just suggest
 ahmia in the [https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en
 hidden service documentation]. Maybe in the future, if ahmia or onioncity
 become a big thing, this will be an obvious step to do if you are a hidden
 service operator.

 - Another big question here is where the onions should go? Would we have
 an OnionAddressAuth that accepts these announcements, and then spits out a
 list of onions and their descriptors? But who runs this authority? Is it
 Tor? Or a friend, like tor2web or ahmia, like the other authorities? Or we
 decentralize the URL list through the existing directory system (which
 increases disk space and traffic for directories...). There might be
 certain legal issues here that we should examine carefully before
 proceeding.

 Also, we are still on the loookout for better names for this system.
 Especially names that make it obvious that you should '''only''' enable
 this if you belong to the Public Hidden Service threat model.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15008>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online