Re: [tor-dev] OnionGatherer: evaluating status of hidden services

[Massimo La Morgia <lamorgia@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 5:39 PM, David Fifield <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 12:58:55PM +0100, Massimo La Morgia wrote:
> we are a research group at Sapienza University, Rome, Italy. We do research on
> distributed systems, Tor, and the Dark Web. As part of our work, we have
> developed OnionGatherer, a service that gives up-to-date information about Dark
> Web hidden services to Tor users.

...and presumably helps you build a crowdsourced list of onion services
that you plan to use for some other research purpose?

yes, of course in this way we are building a crowdsourced list of onion services, but is not really different from onion directories.

At this time we have no plan for other research that use this crowdsourced list.

 

If you're planning a research project on Tor users, you should write to
the research safety board and get ideas about how ot do it in a way that
minimizes risk.
https://research.torproject.org/safetyboard.html

thank you for the suggestion.

 

This idea seems, to me, to have a lot of privacy problems. You're asking
people to use Chrome instead of Tor Browser, which means they will be
vulnerable to a lot of fingerprinting and trivial deanonymization
attacks.

No we are not asking people to use chrome for browsing on tor, but we are offering a service that can help them to know if a onion address is up before start to surf with Tor Browser

 

Your extension reports not only the onion domains that it
finds, but also the URL of the page you were browsing at the time:
        var _onionsJson_ = JSON.stringify({onions:onions, website: window.location.href});
You need to at least inform your research subjects/users what of their
private data you are storing and what you are doing with it.

As you can see from the source code we are not storing any sensitive data like ip or users information. do you think that only URL page can damage user privacy?

You're using two different regexes for onion URLs that aren't the same.
The one used during replacement doesn't match "https", so I guess it
will fail on URLs like https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/.
        /^(http(s)?:\/\/)?.{16}(\.onion)\/?.*$/
        /(http:\/\/)?\b[\w\d]{16}\.onion(\/[\S]*|)/

Yes, you right, thank you for the feedback.

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