Re: icann opening up of tld's

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 12:30:48PM +0100, Dawney Smith wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Regarding icann's announcement on Thursday about the opening up of TLD's
> detailed at this url:
> 
> http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-4-26jun08-en.htm
> 
> What would be the hidden service privacy implications of someone
> registering the .onion tld? Is this something the tor project should
> look into doing next year?

Well, the first thing to keep in mind is that the Tor client intercepts
addresses, notices whether they're a .onion address, and handles them
itself. So if suddenly a top-level .onion domain springs into existence,
the only real change will be that Tor users won't be able to reach the
new "real" .onion sites.

There remains a security concern for folks who think they're using Tor and
accidentally aren't -- they will attempt to resolve the .onion address
locally. Currently they'll get a resolve failure, but if there's a new
tld they could get a page back. I don't think this is much of a new
vulnerability though, because a local attacker can already spoof DNS
responses and send you to their page. But again this is only a worry
if you have your Tor misconfigured. (Insert request for well-documented
secure transparent proxying solution here. :)

--Roger