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Re: Onion url's

To: or-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Onion url's
From: Michael Gomboc <michael.gomboc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:04:54 -0500
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H

HHow do I access Tor hidden services? ¶

Tor hidden services are named with a special top-level domain (TLD) name in DNS: .onion. Since the .onion TLD is not recognized by the official root DNS servers on the Internet, your application will not get the response it needs to locate the service. Currently, the Tor directory server provides this look-up service; and thus the look-up request must get to the Tor network.

Therefore, your application needs to pass the .onion hostname to Tor directly. You can't try to resolve it to an IP address, since there is no corresponding IP address: the server is hidden, after all!

So, how do you make your application pass the hostname directly to Tor? You can't use SOCKS 4, since SOCKS 4 proxies require an IP from the client (a web browser is an example of a SOCKS client). Even though SOCKS 5 can accept either an IP or a hostname, most applications supporting SOCKS 5 try to resolve the name before passing it to the SOCKS proxy. SOCKS 4a, however, always accepts a hostname: You'll need to use SOCKS 4a.

Some applications, such as the browsers Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari, support sending DNS queries to Tor's SOCKS 5 proxy. Most web browsers don't support SOCKS 4a very well, though. The workaround is to point your web browser at an HTTP proxy, and tell the HTTP proxy to speak to Tor with SOCKS 4a. We recommend Polipo as your HTTP proxy.

For applications that do not support HTTP proxy, and so cannot use Polipo, FreeCap is an alternative. When using FreeCap? set proxy protocol to SOCKS 5 and under settings set DNS name resolving to remote. This will allow you to use almost any program with Tor without leaking DNS lookups and allow those same programs to access hidden services.