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Re: [tor-dev] Proposal: Single onion services



Hi John!

This wonderful proposal has been given number 252 and now pushed in
torspec as a Draft!

    --> 252-single-onion.txt

Thanks!
David

On 03 Sep (14:20:56), John Brooks wrote:
> 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.
> _______________________________________________
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