Re: [tor-talk] Exit nodes can redirect requests?

[Matthew Finkel <matthew.finkel@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Aug 09, 2018 at 08:14:03PM +0200, onionsmasher@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> So I was browsing some old clearnet forum posts using Tails and Tor browser. Some posts had embedded images from a Tor hidden site via onion.casa gateway. That gateway site seems to be inactive nowadays.
> I refreshed the page a few times, and sometimes Tor browser was attempting to load something from the same site but using tor2web.xyz gateway instead.
> I checked page source and didn't spot any references to tor2web.xyz.
> So what happened?

Without seeing the actual website, we can only guess what caused this.
Did you have javascript enabled in Tor Browser? Maybe there was a
javascript file that tries alternative tor2web gateways?

>Can exit nodes redirect requests like this?

It depends. In theory, yes, it could in this case. This would qualify
the exit node as a bad relay, but in practice it could detect onion.casa
is a dead website and it sent a HTTP redirect for tor2web.xyz.

> I mean, if original request was to site.onion.casa/foo but it was redirected to site.tor2web.xyz/foo?
> This was rather strange and I don't really understand what happened. I think it's very questionable if exit nodes do redirects like this. Is it even possible? What have I not noticed?

It seems more likely this was a feature provided by the forum, but if
the exit relay injected a redirect from onion.casa to tor2web.xyz then
it is a good idea to find which relay this is and investigate it.
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