[tor-talk] corridor, a Tor traffic whitelisting gateway

Rusty Bird rustybird at openmailbox.org
Fri Feb 14 14:12:36 UTC 2014


https://github.com/rustybird/corridor - I sign all commits.
Now follows the README.md, but it's easier on the eyes at GitHub.

Rusty



**This is a very early release. HERE BE DRAGONS! Not affiliated with the
Tor Project.**

# corridor, a Tor traffic whitelisting gateway

There are several transparently torifying gateways. They suffer from the
same problems:

- It's tricky to isolate circuits and issue NEWNYM signals, especially
if multiple client computers are involved.
- Any garbage software can pump identifiers into "anonymous" circuits,
and get itself exploited by malicious exit nodes.
- Trust is centralized to the gateway, which is bad enough when used by
one person, and just inappropriate when shared with strangers.

**corridor takes a different approach. It allows only connections to Tor
relays to pass through (no clearnet leaks!), but client computers are
themselves responsible for torifying their own traffic.**

You can think of it as defense in depth for your vanilla TBB or Tails,
for your beautiful scary experimental Qubes proxying schemes, etc. Or
invite the hood to use your WiFi without getting into trouble.
Connections *between* client computers are blocked by default.


## Principle of operation

1. Either run the corridor-data-consensus daemon script, which opens a
Tor control connection and subscribes to NEWCONSENSUS events
(announcements listing all public relays), or pipe any number of
"Bridge" lines into corridor-data-bridges.
2. That data gets sent to corridor-helper-update, which atomically
updates a Linux ipset (a list of IP-address:TCP-port entries accessible
in constant time) named tor_relays.
3. An iptables rule in corridor-forward refuses to forward packets
unless they are going to / coming from one of the relays inside the
ipset. If you pass corridor-forward the network address range you are
offering to clients (e.g. 10.0.0.0/8) as an argument, it will also setup
an iptables MASQUERADE rule for you.


## How does corridor-data-consensus open a Tor control connection?

If $TOR_CONTROL_SOCKET is nonempty (e.g. /var/run/tor/control), use it.
Otherwise, connect to $TOR_CONTROL_HOST (defaults to localhost) on port
$TOR_CONTROL_PORT (defaults to 9051).

If $TOR_CONTROL_COOKIE_AUTH_FILE is nonempty (e.g.
/var/run/tor/control.authcookie), use it.
Otherwise, pass $TOR_CONTROL_PASSWD (defaults to an empty password).


## Pitfalls

**To be secure, your new gateway needs two separate network
interfaces**, like two Ethernet NICs, or one WiFi radio and one DSL
modem. One is to receive incoming traffic from client computers, the
other one is to pass the filtered traffic towards the global internet,
**and they need to be on different networks**: Clients must not be able
to take a shortcut via DHCP, DNS, ICMP Redirect requests, and who knows
what else.


## Dependencies so far

- ipset, iptables, sysctl
- socat (to open control connections)
- sh, grep, sed, sleep, test, echo
- perl (to convert control cookies to hex, easily replacable)
- Linux kernel:
	- CONFIG_IP_SET_HASH_IPPORT
	- CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_MASQUERADE
	- CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_REJECT
	- CONFIG_NF_CONNTRACK_IPV4


## Todo

- Allow IPv6 connections to Tor relays instead of blocking all IPv6 traffic
- Build a WiFi/Ethernet portal that allows access to torproject.org so
people can download TBB:
	- Configure hostapd
	- Configure a DHCP server
	- DNS recurser restricted to torproject.org (maybe also tails.boum.org,
guardianproject.info, f-droid.org)
	- Transparently proxy requests to only their IPs:443 through Tor
	- MITM redirect (all?) requests to port 80 to (an info page linking
to?) https://torproject.org
- Bundle it all up (docker?) for Raspberry Pi / BeagleBone Black


## Redistribution

corridor is in the public domain.

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