[tor-dev] Prop279 and DNS

Jesse V kernelcorn at torproject.org
Tue Apr 4 02:06:24 UTC 2017


On 04/03/2017 05:01 PM, Jeremy Rand wrote:
> Maybe this topic has already been brought up, but in case it hasn't,
> I'll do so.  I notice that Prop279 (onion naming API) defines its own
> API rather than using DNS.  I guess that this is because of security
> concerns about the centralization of the DNS.

Hi Jeremy,

I believe that the general idea with prop279 is simply to introduce an
API for resolving pseudo-TLDs before they were sent through the Tor
network. How that is done is entirely dependent on the naming system.

For example, if a user typed in example.bit into a Namecoin-enabled Tor
browser, the software could then perform your proposed DNS lookup and
rewrite the request before turning it over to the tor binary. In my
case, my OnioNS software rewrites .tor to .onion, since the tor binary
knows how to handle .onion. At the moment, this is a bit hacky because
the software has connect with tor's control port, manually review and
process each lookup, rewrite the the request, and then tell tor to
connect it with a circuit. Prop 279 is designed to make this much easier
and avoid hacky solutions.

-- 
Jesse Victors
Developer of the Onion Name System

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 724 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/attachments/20170403/39483eb7/attachment.sig>


More information about the tor-dev mailing list