I'm very happy to see this proposal! Two quick questions about relay
selection:
* Can a client specify that it wants an exit node whose policy allows
something unusual, e.g. exiting to a port that's not allowed by the
default policy? If not, does the client need to keep picking exit nodes
until it gets a SNIP with a suitable policy?
* Similarly, if a client has restrictions on the guard nodes it can
connect to (fascist firewall or IPv4/v6 restrictions, for example), does
it need to keep picking guards via the directory fallback circuit until
it gets a suitable one?
In both cases, perhaps a client with unusual requirements could first
download the consensus, find a relay matching its requirements, then
send that relay's index in its extend cell, so the relay receiving the
extend cell wouldn't know whether the index was picked randomly by a
client with no special requirements, or non-randomly by a client with
special requirements?
I think this would allow the majority of clients to save bandwidth by
not downloading the consensus, without allowing relays to distinguish
the minority of clients with unusual exit/guard requirements. (The
presence of the full consensus on disk would indicate that the client
had unusual exit/guard requirements at some point, however.)
Cheers,
Michael
On 05/02/2019 17:02, Nick Mathewson wrote:
> Filename: 300-walking-onions.txt
> Title: Walking Onions: Scaling and Saving Bandwidth
> Author: Nick Mathewson
> Created: 5-Feb-2019
> Status: Draft
>
> 0. Status
>
> This proposal describes a mechanism called "Walking Onions" for
> scaling the Tor network and reducing the amount of client bandwidth
> used to maintain a client's view of the Tor network.
>
> This is a draft proposal; there are problems left to be solved and
> questions left to be answered. Once those parts are done, we can
> fill in section 4 with the final details of the design.
>
> 1. Introduction
>
> In the current Tor network design, we assume that every client has a
> complete view of all the relays in the network. To achieve this,
> clients download consensus directories at regular intervals, and
> download descriptors for every relay listed in the directory.
>
> The substitution of microdescriptors for regular descriptors
> (proposal 158) and the use of consensus diffs (proposal 140) have
> lowered the bytes that clients must dedicate to directory operations.
> But we still face the problem that, if we force each client to know
> about every relay in the network, each client's directory traffic
> will grow linearly with the number of relays in the network.
>
> Another drawback in our current system is that client directory
> traffic is front-loaded: clients need to fetch an entire directory
> before they begin building circuits. This places extra delays on
> clients, and extra load on the network.
>
> To anonymize the world, we will need to scale to a much larger number
> of relays and clients: requiring clients to know about every relay in
> the set simply won't scale, and requiring every new client to download
> a large document is also problematic.
>
> There are obvious responses here, and some other anonymity tools have
> taken them. It's possible to have a client only use a fraction of
> the relays in a network--but doing so opens the client to _epistemic
> attacks_, in which the difference in clients' views of the
> network is used to partition their traffic. It's also possible to
> move the problem of selecting relays from the client to the relays
> themselves, and let each relay select the next relay in turn--but
> this choice opens the client to _route capture attacks_, in which a
> malicious relay selects only other malicious relays.
>
> In this proposal, I'll describe a design for eliminating up-front
> client directory downloads. Clients still choose relays at random,
> but without ever having to hold a list of all the relays. This design
> does not require clients to trust relays any more than they do today,
> or open clients to epistemic attacks.
>
> I hope to maintain feature parity with the current Tor design; I'll
> list the places in which I haven't figured out how to do so yet.
>
> I'm naming this design "walking onions". The walking onion (Allium x
> proliferum) reproduces by growing tiny little bulbs at the
> end of a long stalk. When the stalk gets too top-heavy, it flops
> over, and the little bulbs start growing somewhere new.
>
> The rest of this document will run as follows. In section 2, I'll
> explain the ideas behind the "walking onions" design, and how they
> can eliminate the need for regular directory downloads. In section 3, I'll
> answer a number of follow-up questions that arise, and explain how to
> keep various features in Tor working. Section 4 (not yet written)
> will elaborate all the details needed to turn this proposal into a
> concrete set of specification changes.
>
> 2. Overview
>
> 2.1. Recapping proposal 141
>
> Back in Proposal 141 ("Download server descriptors on demand"), Peter
> Palfrader proposed an idea for eliminating ahead-of-time descriptor
> downloads. Instead of fetching all the descriptors in advance, a
> client would fetch the descriptor for each relay in its path right
> before extending the circuit to that relay. For example, if a client
> has a circuit from A->B and wants to extend the circuit to C, the
> client asks B for C's descriptor, and then extends the circuit to C.
>
> (Note that the client needs to fetch the descriptor every time it
> extends the circuit, so that an observer can't tell whether the
> client already had the descriptor or not.)
>
> There are a couple of limitations for this design:
> * It still requires clients to download a consensus.
> * It introduces a extra round-trip to each hop of the circuit
> extension process.
>
> I'll show how to solve these problems in the two sections below.
>
> 2.2. An observation about the ntor handshake.
>
> I'll start with an observation about our current circuit extension
> handshake, ntor: it should not actually be necessary to know a
> relay's onion key before extending to it.
>
> Right now, the client sends:
> NODEID (The relay's identity)
> KEYID (The relay's public onion key)
> CLIENT_PK (a diffie-hellman public key)
>
> and the relay responds with:
> SERVER_PK (a diffie-hellman public key)
> AUTH (a function of the relay's private keys and
> *all* of the public keys.)
>
> Both parties generate shared symmetric keys from the same inputs
> that are are used to create the AUTH value.
>
> The important insight here is that we could easily change
> this handshake so that the client sends only CLIENT_PK, and receives
> NODEID and KEYID as part of the response.
>
> In other words, the client needs to know the relay's onion key to
> _complete_ the handshake, but doesn't actually need to know the
> relay's onion key in order to _initiate_ the handshake.
>
> This is the insight that will let us save a round trip: When the
> client goes to extend a circuit from A->B to C, it can send B a
> request to extend to C and retrieve C's descriptor in a single step.
> Specifically, the client sends only CLIENT_PK, and relay B can include C's
> keys as part of the EXTENDED cell.
>
> 2.3. Extending by certified index
>
> Now I'll explain how the client can avoid having to download a
> list of relays entirely.
>
> First, let's look at how a client chooses a random relay today.
> First, the client puts all of the relays in a list, and computes a
> weighted bandwidth for each one. For example, suppose the relay
> identities are R1, R2, R3, R4, and R5, and their bandwidth weights
> are 50, 40, 30, 20, and 10. The client makes a table like this:
>
> Relay Weight Range of index values
> R1 50 0..49
> R2 40 50..89
> R3 30 90..119
> R4 20 120..139
> R5 10 140..149
>
> To choose a random relay, the client picks a random index value
> between 0 and 149 inclusive, and looks up the corresponding relay in
> the table. For example, if the client's random number is 77, it will
> choose R2. If its random number is 137, it chooses R4.
>
> The key observation for the "walking onions" design is that the
> client doesn't actually need to construct this table itself.
> Instead, we will have this table be constructed by the authorities
> and distributed to all the relays.
>
> Here's how it works: let's have the authorities make a new kind of
> consensus-like thing. We'll call it an Efficient Network Directory
> with Individually Verifiable Entries, or "ENDIVE" for short. This
> will differ from the client's index table above in two ways. First,
> every entry in the ENDIVE is normalized so that the bandwidth
> weights maximum index is 2^32-1:
>
> Relay Normalized weight Range of index values
> R1 0x55555546 0x00000000..0x55555545
> R2 0x44444438 0x55555546..0x9999997d
> R3 0x3333332a 0x9999997e..0xcccccca7
> R4 0x2222221c 0xcccccca8..0xeeeeeec3
> R5 0x1111113c 0xeeeeeec4..0xffffffff
>
> Second, every entry in the ENDIVE is timestamped and signed by the
> authorities independently, so that when a client sees a line from the
> table above, it can verify that it came from an authentic ENDIVE.
> When a client has chosen a random index, one of these entries will
> prove to the client that a given relay corresponds to that index.
> Because of this property, we'll be calling these entries "Separable
> Network Index Proofs", or "SNIP"s for short.
>
> For example, a single SNIP from the table above might consist of:
> * A range of times during which this SNIP is valid
> * R1's identity
> * R1's ntor onion key
> * R1's address
> * The index range 0x00000000..0x55555545
> * A signature of all of the above, by a number of authorities
>
> Let's put it together. Suppose that the client has a circuit from
> A->B, and it wants to extend to a random relay, chosen randomly
> weighted by bandwidth.
>
> 1. The client picks a random index value between 0 and 2**32 - 1. It
> sends that index to relay B in its EXTEND cell, along with a
> g^x value for the ntor handshake.
>
> Note: the client doesn't send an address or identity for the next
> relay, since it doesn't know what relay it has chosen! (The
> combination of an index and a g^x value is what I'm calling a
> "walking onion".)
>
> 2. Now, relay B looks up the index in its most recent ENDIVE, to
> learn which relay the client selected.
>
> (For example, suppose that the client's random index value is
> 0x50000001. This index value falls between 0x00000000 and
> 0x55555546 in the table above, so the relay B sees that the client
> has chosen R1 as its next hop.)
>
> 3. Relay B sends a create cell to R1 as usual. When it gets a
> CREATED reply, it includes the authority-signed SNIP for
> R1 as part of the EXTENDED cell.
>
> 4. As part of verifying the handshake, the client verifies that the
> SNIP was signed by enough authorities, that its timestamp
> is recent enough, and that it actually corresponds to the
> random index that the client selected.
>
> Notice the properties we have with this design:
>
> - Clients can extend circuits without having a list of all the
> relays.
>
> - Because the client's random index needs to match a routing
> entry signed by the authorities, the client is still selecting
> a relay randomly by weight. A hostile relay cannot choose
> which relay to send the client.
>
>
> On a failure to extend, a relay should still report the routing entry
> for the other relay that it couldn't connect to. As before, a client
> will start a new circuit if a partially constructed circuit is a
> partial failure.
>
>
> We could achieve a reliability/security tradeoff by letting clients
> offer the relay a choice of two or more indices to extend to.
> This would help reliability, but give the relay more influence over
> the path. We'd need to analyze this impact.
>
>
> In the next section, I'll discuss a bunch of details that we need to
> straighten out in order to make this design work.
>
>
> 3. Sorting out the details.
>
> 3.1. Will these routing entries fit in EXTEND2 and EXTENDED2 cells?
>
> The EXTEND2 cell is probably big enough for this design. The random
> index that the client sends can be a new "link specifier" type,
> replacing the IP and identity link specifiers.
>
> The EXTENDED2 cell is likely to need to grow here. We'll need to
> implement proposal 249 ("Allow CREATE cells with >505 bytes of
> handshake data") so that EXTEND2 and EXTENDED2 cells can be larger.
>
> 3.2. How should SNIPs be signed?
>
> We have a few options, and I'd like to look into the possibilities
> here more closely.
>
> The simplest possibility is to use **multiple signatures** on each
> SNIP, the way we do today for consensuses. These signatures should
> be made using medium-term Ed25519 keys from the authorities. At a
> cost of 64 bytes per signature, at 9 authorities, we would need 576
> bytes for each SNIP. These signatures could be batch-verified to
> save time at the client side. Since generating a signature takes
> around 20 usec on my mediocre laptop, authorities should be able to
> generate this many signatures fairly easily.
>
> Another possibility is to use a **threshold signature** on each SNIP,
> so that the authorities collaboratively generate a short signature
> that the clients can verify. There are multiple threshold signature
> schemes that we could consider here, though I haven't yet found one
> that looks perfect.
>
> Another possibility is to use organize the SNIPs in a **merkle tree
> with a signed root**. For this design, clients could download the
> signed root periodically, and receive the hash-path from the signed
> root to the SNIP. This design might help with
> certificate-transparency-style designs, and it would be necessary if we
> ever want to move to a postquantum signature algorithm that requires
> large signatures.
>
> Another possibility (due to a conversation among Chelsea Komlo, Sajin
> Sasy, and Ian Goldberg), is to *use SNARKs*. (Why not? All the cool
> kids are doing it!) For this, we'd have the clients download a
> signed hash of the ENDIVE periodically, and have the authorities
> generate a SNARK for each SNIP, proving its presence in that
> document.
>
> 3.3. How can we detect authority misbehavior?
>
> We might want to take countermeasures against the possibility that a
> quorum of corrupt or compromised authorities give some relays a
> different set of SNIPs than they give other relays.
>
> If we incorporate a merkle tree or a hash chain in the design, we can
> use mechanisms similar to certificate transparency to ensure that the
> authorities have a consistent log of all the entries that they have
> ever handed out.
>
> 3.4. How many types of weighted node selection are there, and how do we
> handle them?
>
> Right now, there are multiple weights that we use in Tor:
> * Weight for exit
> * Weight for guard
> * Weight for middle node
>
> We also filter nodes for several properties, such as flags they have.
>
> To reproduce this behavior, we should enumerate the various weights
> and filters that we use, and (if there are not too many) create a
> separate index for each. For example, the Guard index would weight
> every node for selection as guard, assigning 0 weight to non-Guard
> nodes. The Exit index would weight every node for selection as an
> exit, assigning 0 weight to non-Exit nodes.
>
> When choosing a relay, the client would have to specify which index
> to use. We could either have a separate (labeled) set of SNIPs
> entries for each index, or we could have each SNIP have a separate
> (labeled) index range for each index.
>
> REGRESSION: the client's choice of which index to use would leak the
> next router's position and purpose in the circuit. This information
> is something that we believe relays can infer now, but it's not a
> desired feature that they can.
>
> 3.5. Does this design break onion service introduce handshakes?
>
> In rend-spec-v3.txt section 3.3.2, we specify a variant of ntor for
> use in INTRODUCE2 handshakes. It allows the client to send encrypted
> data as part of its initial ntor handshake, but requires the client
> to know the onion service's onion key before it sends its initial
> handshake.
>
> That won't be a problem for us here, though: we still require clients
> to fetch onion service descriptors before contacting a onion
> service.
>
> 3.6. How does the onion service directory work here?
>
> The onion service directory is implemented as a hash ring, where
> each relay's position in the hash ring is decided by a hash of its
> identity, the current date, and a shared random value that the
> authorities compute each day.
>
> To implement this hash ring using walking onions, we would need to
> have an extra index based not on bandwidth, but on position in the
> hash ring. Then onion services and clients could build a circuit,
> then extend it one more hop specifying their desired index in the
> hash ring.
>
> We could either have a command to retrieve a trio of hashring-based
> routing entries by index, or to retrieve (or connect to?) the n'th item
> after a given hashring entry.
>
> 3.7. How can clients choose guard nodes?
>
> We can reuse the fallback directories here. A newly bootstrapping
> client would connect to a fallback directory, then build a three-hop
> circuit, and finally extend the three-hop circuit by indexing to a
> random guard node. The random guard node's SNIP would
> contain the information that the client needs to build real circuits
> through that guard in the future. Because the client would be
> building a three-hop circuit, the fallback directory would not learn
> the client's guards.
>
> (Note that even if the extend attempt fails, we should still pick the
> node as a possible guard based on its router entry, so that other
> nodes can't veto our choice of guards.)
>
> 3.8. Does the walking onions design preclude postquantum circuit handshakes?
>
> Not at all! Both proposal 263 (ntru) and proposal 270 (newhope) work
> by having the client generate an ephemeral key as part of its initial
> handshake. The client does not need to know the relay's onion key to
> do this, so we can still integrate those proposals with this one.
>
> 3.9. Does the walking onions design stop us from changing the network
> topology?
>
> For Tor to continue to scale, we will someday need to accept that not
> every relay can be simultaneously connected to every other relay.
> Therefore, we will need to move from our current clique topology
> assumption to some other topology.
>
> There are also proposals to change node selection rules to generate
> routes providing better performance, or improved resistance to local
> adversaries.
>
> We can, I think, implement this kind of proposal by changing the way
> that ENDIVEs are generated. Instead giving every relay the same
> ENDIVE, the authorities would generate different ENDIVEs for
> different relays, depending on the probability distribution of which
> relay should be chosen after which in the network topology. In the
> extreme case, this would produce O(n) ENDIVEs and O(n^2) SNIPs. In
> practice, I hope that we could do better by having the network
> topology be non-clique, and by having many relays share the same
> distribution of successors.
>
>
> 3.10. How can clients handle exit policies?
>
> This is an unsolved challenge. If the client tells the middle relay
> its target port, it leaks information inappropriately.
>
> One possibility is to try to gather exit policies into common
> categories, such as "most ports supported" and "most common ports
> supported".
>
> Another (inefficient) possibility is for clients to keep trying exits
> until they find one that works.
>
> Another (inefficient) possibility is to require that clients who use
> unusual ports fall back to the old mechanism for route selection.
>
>
> 3.11. Can this approach support families?
>
> This is an unsolved challenge.
>
> One (inefficient) possibility is for clients to generate circuits and
> discard those that use multiple relays in the same family.
>
> One (not quite compatible) possibility is for the authorities to sort
> the ENDIVE so that relays in the same family are adjacent to
> one another. The index-bounds part of each SNIP would also
> have to include the bounds of the family. This approach is not quite
> compatible with the status quo, because it prevents relays from
> belonging to more than one family.
>
> One interesting possibility (due to Chelsea Komlo, Sajin Sasy, and
> Ian Goldberg) is for the middle node to take responsibility for
> family enforcement. In this design, the client might offer the middle
> node multiple options for the next relay's index, and the middle node
> would choose the first such relay that is neither in its family nor
> its predecessor's family. We'd need to look for a way to make sure
> that the middle node wasn't biasing the path selection.
>
> (TODO: come up with more ideas here.)
>
> 3.12. Can walking onions support IP-based and country-based restrictions?
>
> This is an unsolved challenge.
>
> If the user's restrictions do not exclude most paths, one
> (inefficient) possibility is for the user to generate paths until
> they generate one that they like. This idea becomes inefficient
> if the user is excluding most paths.
>
> Another (inefficient and fingerprintable) possibility is to require
> that clients who use complex path restrictions fall back to the old
> mechanism for route selection.
>
> (TODO: come up with better ideas here.)
>
> 3.13. What scaling problems have we not solved with this design?
>
> The walking onions design doesn't solve (on its own) the problem that
> the authorities need to know about every relay, and arrange to have
> every relay tested.
>
> The walking onions design doesn't solve (on its own) the problem that
> relays need to have a list of all the relays. (But see section 3.9
> above.)
>
> 3.14. Should we still have clients download a consensus when they're
> using walking onions?
>
> There are some fields in the current consensus directory documents
> that the clients will still need, like the list of supported
> protocols and network parameters. A client that uses walking onions
> should download a new flavor of consensus document that contains only
> these fields, and does not list any relays. In some signature
> schemes, this consensus would contain a digest of the ENDIVE -- see
> 3.2 above.
>
> (Note that this document would be a "consensus document" but not a
> "consensus directory", since it doesn't list any relays.)
>
>
> 4. Putting it all together
>
> [This is the section where, in a later version of this proposal, I
> would specify the exact behavior and data formats to be used here.
> Right now, I'd say we're too early in the design phase.]
>
>
> A.1. Acknowledgments
>
> Thanks to Peter Palfrader for his original design in proposal 141,
> and to the designers of PIR-Tor, both of which inspired aspects of
> this Walking Onions design.
>
> Thanks to Chelsea Komlo, Sajin Sasy, and Ian Goldberg for feedback on
> an earlier version of this design.
>
> Thanks to David Goulet, Teor, and George Kadianakis for commentary on
> earlier versions of this draft.
>
> A.2. Additional ideas
>
> Teor notes that there are ways to try to get this idea to apply to
> one-pass circuit construction, something like the old onion design.
> We might be able to derive indices and keys from the same seeds,
> even. I don't see a way to do this without losing forward secrecy,
> but it might be worth looking at harder.
> _______________________________________________
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>
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