hidden service maps

[Ben Wilhelm]

Grant Heller wrote:
> Thank you for replying, Ben.
>  
> Can (the concept of) a hidden service be simplified to that of any 
> arbitrary protocol?  Reconfigure an application to point to Tor instead 
> of the Internet and if the hidden service exists, the application will 
> communicate normally?

No prob. :)

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: Yes, but it's a little more difficult. The application 
can't try to connect via IP, because hidden services don't have IPs. It 
has to connect via a hostname. As I understand it, this means the 
application must be using SOCKS 4a or SOCKS 5, and also must be set up 
to do that - a lot of applications simply aren't, and expect to be able 
to resolve the host and then connect to the IP in two separate steps. 
Which, in fairness, works in virtually all cases.

If the application is properly coded, then, yes, any system which 
doesn't break the network layering hierarchy will work just fine, given 
an appropriate onion address.

It would presumably be possible to rig up some kind of wacky system that 
mapped private IPs to onion addresses on the fly, but Tor doesn't have 
that yet (and I don't know if they've even bothered considering 
implementing it, there are bigger issues.)

-Ben