[Author Prev][Author Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Author Index][Thread Index]

[tor-dev] Proposal: Single onion services



Hereâs a delayed shipment from the hidden services hackfest:

   Single onion services are a modified form of onion services, which
   trade
   service-side location privacy for improved performance, reliability,
   and
   scalability.

   Single onion services have a .onion address identical to any other
   onion
   service. The descriptor contains information sufficient to do a relay
   extend of a circuit to the onion service and to open a stream for the
   onion address. The introduction point and rendezvous protocols are
   bypassed for these services.

The full proposal by Paul, Roger, and myself is below, and available
from:

https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/special/torspec.git/plain/proposals/ideas/single-onion.txt?h=single-onion

Thanks especially to Paul, who is behind this whole concept, and all of
the other participants of the Arlington Accords.

- special

-----

Filename: xxx-single-onion.txt
Title: Single Onion Services
Author: John Brooks, Paul Syverson, Roger Dingledine
Created: 2015-07-13
Status: Draft

1. Overview

   Single onion services are a modified form of onion services, which
   trade
   service-side location privacy for improved performance, reliability,
   and
   scalability.

   Single onion services have a .onion address identical to any other
   onion
   service. The descriptor contains information sufficient to do a relay
   extend of a circuit to the onion service and to open a stream for the
   onion
   address. The introduction point and rendezvous protocols are bypassed
   for
   these services.

   We also specify behavior for a tor instance to publish a single onion
   service, which requires a reachable OR port, without necessarily
   acting
   as a public relay in the network.

2. Motivation

   Single onion services have a few benefits over double onion services:

      * Connection latency is much lower by skipping rendezvous
      * Stream latency is reduced on a 4-hop circuit
      * Removing rendezvous circuits improves service scalability
      * A single onion service can use multiple relays for load
      balancing

   Single onion services are not location hidden on the service side,
   but clients retain all of the benefits and privacy of onion
   services. More details, relation to double onion services, and the
   rationale for the 'single' and 'double' nomenclature are further
   described in section 7.4.

   We believe these improvements, along with the other benefits of onion
   services, will be a significant incentive for website and other
   internet
   service operators to provide these portals to preserve the privacy of
   their
   users.

3. Onion descriptors

   The onion descriptor format is extended to add:

     "service-extend-locations" NL encrypted-string
       [At most once]

       A list of relay extend info, which is used instead of
       introduction
       points and rendezvous for single onion services. This field is
       encoded and optionally encrypted in the same way as the
       "introduction-points" field.

       The encoded contents of this field contains no more than 10
       entries,
       each containing the following data:

         "service-extend-location" SP link-specifiers NL
            [At start, exactly once]
            link-specifiers is a base64 encoded link specifier block, in
            the format described by proposal 224 [BUILDING-BLOCKS] and
            the
            EXTEND2 cell.

          "onion-key" SP key-type NL onion-key
            [Exactly once]
            Describes the onion key that must be used when extending to
            the
            single onion service relay.

            The key-type field is one of:
               "tap"
                  onion-key is a PEM-encoded RSA relay onion key
               "ntor"
                  onion-key is a base64-encoded NTOR relay onion key

   [XXX: Should there be some kind of cookie to prove that we have the
   desc?
   See also section 7.1. -special]

   A descriptor may contain either or both of "introduction-points" and
   "service-extend-locations"; see section 5.2.

   [XXX: What kind of backwards compatibility issues exist here? Will
   existing
   relays accept one of those descriptors? -special]

4. Reaching a single onion service as a client

   Single onion services use normal onion hostnames, so the client will
   first request the service's descriptor. If the descriptor contains a
   "service-extend-locations" field, the client should ignore the
   introduction
   points and rendezvous process in favor of the process defined here.

   The descriptor's "service-extend-locations" information is sufficient
   for a
   client to extend a circuit to the onion service, regardless of
   whether it is
   also listed as a relay in the network consensus. This extend info
   must not
   be used for any other purpose. If multiple extend locations are
   specified,
   the client should randomly select one.

   The client uses a 3-hop circuit to extend to the service location
   from the
   descriptor. Once this circuit is built, the client sends a BEGIN cell
   to
   the relay, with the onion address as hostname and the desired TCP
   port.

   If the circuit or stream fails, the client should retry using another
   extend location from the descriptor. If all extend locations fail,
   and the
   descriptor contains an "introduction-points" field, the client may
   fall back
   to a full rendezvous operation.

5. Publishing a single onion service

   To act as a single onion service, a tor instance (or cooperating
   group of
   tor instances) must:

      * Have a publicly accessible OR port
      * Publish onion descriptors in the same manner as any onion
      service
      * Include a "service-extend-locations" section in the onion
      descriptor
      * Accept RELAY_BEGIN cells for the service as defined in section
      5.3

5.1. Configuration options

   The tor server operating a single onion service must accept
   connections as
   a tor relay, but is not required to be published in the consensus or
   to
   allow extending circuits. To enable this, we propose the following
   configuration option:

      RelayAllowExtend 0|1
         If set, allow clients to extend circuits from this relay.
         Otherwise,
         refuse all extend cells. PublishServerDescriptor must also be
         disabled
         if this option is disabled. If ExitRelay is also disabled, this
         relay
         will not pass through any traffic.

5.2. Publishing descriptors

   A single onion service must publish descriptors in the same manner as
   any
   onion service, as defined by rend-spec and section 3 of this
   proposal.

   Optionally, a set of introduction points may be included in the
   descriptor
   to provide backwards compatibility with clients that don't support
   single
   onion services, or to provide a fallback when the extend locations
   fail.

5.3. RELAY_BEGIN

   When a RELAY_BEGIN cell is received with a configured single onion
   hostname
   as the destination, the stream should be connected to the configured
   backend
   server in the same manner as a service-side rendezvous stream.

   All relays must reject any RELAY_BEGIN cell with an address ending in
   ".onion" that does not match a locally configured single onion
   service.

6. Other considerations

6.1. Load balancing

   High capacity services can distribute load by including multiple
   entries
   in the "service-extend-locations" section of the descriptor, or by
   publishing several descriptors to different onion service
   directories, or
   by a combination of these methods.

6.2. Benefits of also running a Tor relay

   If a single onion service also acts as a published tor relay, it will
   keep
   connections to many other tor relays. This can significantly reduce
   the
   latency of connections to the single onion service, and also helps
   the tor
   network.

6.3. Proposal 224 ("Next-Generation Hidden Services")

   This proposal is compatible with proposal 224, with small changes to
   the
   service descriptor format. In particular:

   The "service-extend-location" sections are included in the encrypted
   portion
   of the descriptor, adjacent to any "introduction-point" sections. The
   "service-extend-locations" field is no longer present. An onion
   service is
   also single onion service if any "service-extend-location" field is
   present.

6.4. Proposal 246 ("Merging Hidden Service Directories and Intro
Points")

   This proposal is compatible with proposal 246. The onion service will
   publish its descriptor to the introduction points in the same manner
   as any
   other onion service. The client may choose to build a circuit to the
   specified relays, or to continue with the rendezvous protocol.

   The client should not extend from the introduction point to the
   single onion
   service's relay, to avoid overloading the introduction point. The
   client
   may truncate the circuit and extend through a new relay.

7. Discussion

7.1. Authorization

   Client authorization for a single onion service is possible through
   encryption of the service-extend-locations section in the descriptor,
   or
   "stealth" publication under a new onion address, as with traditional
   onion services.

   One problem with this is that if you suspect a relay is also serving
   a
   single onion service, you can connect to it and send RELAY_BEGIN
   without
   any further authorization. To prevent this, we would need to include
   a
   cookie from the descriptor in the RELAY_BEGIN information.

7.2. Preventing relays from being unintentionally published

   Many single onion servers will not want to relay other traffic, and
   will
   set 'PublishServerDescriptor 0' to prevent it. Even when they do,
   they will
   still generate a relay descriptor, which could be downloaded and
   published
   to a directory authority without the relay's consent. To prevent
   this, we
   should insert a field in the relay descriptor when
   PublishServerDescriptor
   is disabled that instructs relays to never include it as part of a
   consensus.

   [XXX: Also see task #16564]

7.3. Ephemeral single onion services (ADD_ONION)

   The ADD_ONION control port command could be extended to support
   ephemerally
   configured single onion services. We encourage this, but specifying
   its
   behavior is out of the scope of this proposal.

7.4. Onion service taxonomy and nomenclature

   Onion services in general provide several benefits. First, by
   requiring a connection via Tor they provide the client the
   protections of Tor and make it much more difficult to inadvertently
   bypass those protections than when connecting to a non .onion site.
   Second, because .onion addresses are self-authenticating, onion
   services have look-up, routing, and authentication protections not
   provided by sites with standard domain addresses. These benefits
   apply to all onion services.

   Onion services as originally introduced also provide network
   location hiding of the service itself: because the client only ever
   connects through the end of a Tor circuit created by the onion
   service, the IP address of the onion service also remains
   protected.

   Applications and services already exist that use existing onion
   service protocols for the above described general benefits without
   the need for network location hiding. This Proposal is
   accordingly motivated by a desire to provide the general benefits,
   without the complexity and overhead of also protecting the location
   of the service.

   Further, as with what had originally been called 'location hidden
   services', there may be useful and valid applications of this
   design that are not reflected in our current intent. Just as
   'location hidden service' is a misleading name for many current
   onion service applications, we prefer a name that is descriptive of
   the system but flexible with respect to applications of it. We also
   prefer a nomenclature that consistently works for the different
   types of onion services.

   It is also important to have short, simple names lest usage
   efficiencies evolve easier names for us. For example, 'hidden
   service' has replaced the original 'location hidden service' in Tor
   Proposals and other writings.

   For these reasons, we have chosen 'onion services' to refer to both
   those as set out in this Proposal and those with the client-side
   and server-side protections of the original---also for referring
   indiscriminately to any and all onion services. We use
   'double-onion service' to refer to services that join two Tor
   circuits, one from the server and one from the client. We use
   'single-onion' when referring to services that use only a
   client-side Tor circuit. In speech we sometimes use the even
   briefer, 'two-nion' and 'one-ion' respectively.
_______________________________________________
tor-dev mailing list
tor-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev