[tor-talk] Accessing .Onion Service From Mobile

[Drew at FoundingDocuments.org]

Dear Tor-Talk, 

Once I heard about Tor's abilities to get a service out past NATs I was very excited.

Now I am stuck trying to reach it.

I'm trying to figure out the pieces of synchronizing my to-do list from my computer's WebDAV server with my mobile device. On my mobile there's a companion app, it syncs fine over WiFi LAN when it's given my computer's IPv4 address. 

But the problem is how to give my to-do list app on iOS the .onion address for the WebDAV server? 

1) Make a feature request to the app vendor to deal with the Tor network? I.e. embed Tor.

2) Find an app in a specific so-called walled-garden-app-store that promises to be my proxy so that one or more apps can deal with .onion addresses? I.e. some app that's embedded Tor. 

3) Submit yet another security enhancement request to a certain hardware/OS vendor. Mainly asking them to handle requests to .onion addresses at the OS level, thus negating this manual intervention. 

4) See what I can hack or cobble together on my own.


I have decided to go with v3 Onion Service. My computer runs both my to-do list keeper and the WebDAV server, although the latter is open to change. 

I’m motivated enough to write feature requests but realistic enough to know that unless they’ve been working on it for a while, what I ask for would be at least 1 major version away. So that’s #1 & #3 out of the way. 

With regards to #2, I’ve not inspected every app in a big name app store, but none of them seem to offer what I want; please correct me if I’m wrong. I see lots of web browsers, and plenty of for-hire external VPNs. 

But I don’t see anything where an on-device VPN/proxy server can be set up, similar to Charles Proxy; but with Tor-specific features. (Charles Proxy sets up a VPN connection to itself, it has a great blocking feature, but its DNS spoofing isn’t robust enough (best I can tell) for me to use it with .onion addresses. However, it may be that CP is the closest to what I want, so I may begin my feature requests there; to see if he will add Tor features and feature for Tor.)


Leaving #4 which is mostly two main options I think: 
Learn about or figure out some middleware device that plugs into the iOS device, and sits between it and .onion addresses. This sounds needlessly complex and expensive; ugly and easily misplaced.

The final option is to dream big about compiling my own multilayered Tor app. 

Since it will probably be a while before average mobile apps get the ability to talk to .onion addresses, it would be nice if there was some middle ground, on-device app, that handled translation between .onion and IPs for non-Tor aware apps. Allowing for some apps to be forced through Tor while other apps aren’t. 

Thank you.