hidden service maps

[Grant Heller]

Okay, that makes sense to me.  Thank you for taking the time to explain.

On 5/19/08, Ben Wilhelm <zorba-tor at pavlovian.net> wrote:
>
> 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
>
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