[tor-bugs] #32678 [Core Tor/Tor]: Tor's DNS cache leaks information

Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki blackhole at torproject.org
Thu Dec 5 19:30:03 UTC 2019


#32678: Tor's DNS cache leaks information
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     Reporter:  mikeperry     |      Owner:  (none)
         Type:  defect        |     Status:  new
     Priority:  Medium        |  Milestone:
    Component:  Core Tor/Tor  |    Version:
     Severity:  Normal        |   Keywords:
Actual Points:                |  Parent ID:
       Points:                |   Reviewer:
      Sponsor:                |
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 In a soon-to-appear paper by Tobias Pulls and Rasmus Dahlberg, they
 discovered that it was possible to use Tor's Exit DNS cache to determine
 if a particular domain was accessed from that exit in the past hour.

 One option is to disable caching entirely. I'm not a fan of this approach.

 I think it is better for the cache to perform some kind of "hotness"
 threshold, where entries are stored in the cache as today, but not *used*
 from the cache until they are "hot" enough to no longer represent unique
 visits.. Something like N hits in T time. The edges of this threshhold
 would have to be randomized, to prevent an adversary from trivially
 keeping the cache on the edge of "hot" in order to probe it as it crosses
 over to hot by one visit..

 The cache in general should be more closely tied to RTT, IMO, so we can
 cache longer than an hour if a name supports it. It also should be given
 better OOM priority, so it is not trivial to flush by SENDME window
 filling attacks.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32678>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
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