[tor-talk] Facebook now available at https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/

[pritam borkar]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8538281

On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 5:47 PM, Murdoch, Steven <s.murdoch at ucl.ac.uk>
wrote:

> Facebook have now provided a Tor hidden service, see:
>
> https://www.facebook.com/notes/protect-the-graph/making-connections-to-facebook-more-secure/1526085754298237
>
> —
> Facebook Onion Address
>
> Facebook's onion address provides a way to access Facebook through Tor
> without losing the cryptographic protections provided by the Tor cloud.
>
> The idea is that the Facebook onion address connects you to Facebook's
> Core WWW Infrastructure - check the URL again, you'll see what we did there
> - and it reflects one benefit of accessing Facebook this way: that it
> provides end-to-end communication, from your browser directly into a
> Facebook datacentre.
>
> We decided to use SSL atop this service due in part to architectural
> considerations - for example, we use the Tor daemon as a reverse proxy into
> a load balancer and Facebook traffic requires the protection of SSL over
> that link. As a result, we have provided an SSL certificate which cites our
> onion address; this mechanism removes the Tor Browser's “SSL Certificate
> Warning” for that onion address and increases confidence that this service
> really is run by Facebook. Issuing an SSL certificate for a Tor
> implementation is - in the Tor world - a novel solution to attribute
> ownership of an onion address; other solutions for attribution are ripe for
> consideration, but we believe that this one provides an appropriate
> starting point for such discussion.
>
> Over time we hope to share some of the lessons that we have learned - and
> will learn - about scaling and deploying services via the Facebook onion
> address; we have many ideas and are looking forward to improving this
> service.  A medium-term goal will be to support Facebook's mobile-friendly
> website via an onion address, although in the meantime we expect the
> service to be of an evolutionary and slightly flaky nature.
>
> We hope that these and other features will be useful to people who wish to
> use Facebook's onion address.
>
> Finally, we would like to extend our thanks to Ms. Runa Sandvik and to Dr.
> Steven Murdoch of UCL for their kind assistance and generous advice in the
> development of this project.
>
> Alec Muffett is a Software Engineer for Security Infrastructure at
> Facebook London.
> —
>
> Best wishes,
> Steven
>
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