-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi everyone, we would like to propose an extension of Tor hidden services towards providing authentication. This includes authentication at the hidden service and at introduction points, both either via password or public-key authentication. This gives us the new security property of access control, improves hiding service activity from unauthorized clients, and reduces traffic by dropping false requests as soon as possible. Comments are welcome! :) - --Tobias, Thomas, Karsten, Ferdinand, and Christoph -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFG+mqt0M+WPffBEmURAjNyAKCyox0rlBwiygrNtI7PU2JrPQX/xgCfW3QK V91+U7PrgcW+cIJYvUrt+BE= =LyG0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Filename: 121-hidden-service-authentication.txt
Title: Hidden Service Authentication
Version: $LastChangedRevision: 469 $
Last-Modified: $LastChangedDate: 2007-09-26 14:16:52 +0200 (Mi, 26 Sep 2007) $
Author: Tobias Kamm, Thomas Lauterbach, Karsten Loesing, Ferdinand Rieger,
Christoph Weingarten
Created: 10-Sep-2007
Status: Open
Change history:
26-Sep-2007 Initial proposal for or-dev
Overview:
This proposal deals with some possibilities to implement authentication
for restricted access to hidden services. This way we try to increase the
security level for the service provider (Bob) by giving him the ability
to exclude non-authorized users from using his service. It is based on
proposal 114-distributed-storage but is better suited for a fine grained
way of authentication, because it is less resource-consuming. Whenever we
refer to service descriptors and cell formats, we are talking about the
definitions found in 114-distributed-storage unless otherwise stated.
We discuss password and public-key authentication for the Onion Proxy
(OP) of Bob's hidden service (HS). Furthermore a challenge-response
authentication mechanism is introduced at the introduction point.
These modifications aim at:
- increasing the security of hidden services by limiting access only to
authorized users (specification see details) and
- reducing the traffic in the network by rejecting unauthorized access
requests earlier.
Motivation:
The currently used implementation of hidden services does not provide any
kind of authentication. The v2 implementation adds an authentication
mechanism at the directory server. Security can be further improved by
adding two more authentication authorities at the introduction point
(IPo) and the OP.
Although the service descriptors are already designed to carry
authentication information the existing fields are not used so far.
Moreover one can find a couple of notes at the specification of cell
formats (rend-spec) which point at adding authentication information but
no fields are specified yet. It would be preferable to extend the Tor
network with authentication features to offer a solution for all
services. This would also provide means to authorize access to services
that currently do not support authentication mechanisms. Moreover, Bob's
authentication administration for all services could be performed
centralized in the Tor application, and the implementation overhead for
developers would be significantly reduced. Another benefit would be the
reduced traffic by checking authentication data and dropping unauthorized
requests as soon as possible. For example unauthorized requests could
already be discarded at the introduction points.
In addition to that, our implementation is able to hide the service from
users, who still have access to the secret cookie (see
114-distributed-storage) but should no longer be authorized. Bob can now
not only hide his location, but also to a certain degree his presence
towards unauthorized clients given that none of his IPo's are corrupted.
Details:
/1/ Client authentication at the hidden service
In proposal 114 a client (Alice) who has a valid secret cookie, which may
be considered as a form of authentication, and a service ID is able to
connect to Bob if he is online. He can not distinguish between Alice
being intentionally authorized by himself or being an attacker.
Integrating authentication in Tor HS will ensure Bob that Alice is only
able to use the service if she is authorized by him.
Authentication data will be transmitted via the RELAY_INTRODUCE1 cell
from Alice to Bob that is forwarded by the IPo. For this message several
format versions are specified in the rend-spec in section 1.8. We will
use the format version 3. This specification already contains the fields
"AUTHT" (to specify the authentication method), "AUTHL" (length of the
authentication data), and "AUTHD" (the authentication data) that will be
used to store authentication data. Since these fields are encrypted with
the service's public key, sniffing attacks will fail. Bob will only build
the circuit to the rendezvous point if the provided authentication data
is valid, otherwise he will drop the cell. This will improve security due
to preventing communication between Bob and Alice if she is an attacker.
As a positive side effect it reduces network traffic because it avoids
Bob from building unnecessary circuits to the rendezvous points.
Authentication at the HS should be the last gatekeeper and the number of
cases in which a client successfully passes the introduction point, but
fails at the HS should be almost zero. Therefore it is very important to
perform fine-grained access control already at the IPo (but without
relying on it).
The first authentication mechanism that will be supported is password
(symmetric secret) authentication. "AUTHT" is set to "1" for this
authentication method while the "AUTHL" field is set to "20", the length
of the SHA-1 digest of the password.
(1) Alice creates a password x and sends the password digest h(x) to Bob
out of band.
(2) Alice sends h(x) to Bob, encrypted with Bob's fresh service key (not
subject to this proposal, see proposal 114).
(3) Bob decrypts Alice's message using his private service key (see
proposal 114) and compares the contained h(x) with what he knows what
Alice's password digest h(x) should be.
This kind of authentication is well-known. It has the known disadvantage
of weak passwords that are vulnerable to dictionary or brute-force
attacks. Nevertheless it seems to be an appropriate solution since safe
passwords can be randomly generated by Tor. Cracking methods that rely on
guessing passwords should not be effective in the constantly changing
network infrastructure. A usability advantage is that this method is easy
to perform even for unexperienced users. The authenticationdata will be
the SHA-1 secure hash (see tor-spec) of the shared secret (password).
The premise to use password authentication is that Bob must send the
password to Alice outside Tor. If at the same time the secret cookie is
transmitted and the message is intercepted the attacker can gain access
to the service. Therefore, a secure way to exchange this information must
be established.
The second authentication mechanism is public-key authentication. The
well-known RSA implementation will be used as cipher (see tor-spec).
Authentication data will be the hash of the rendezvous cookie, signed
with the private key (SK).
When Alice wants to use this authentication method she sets "AUTHT" to
"2" and "AUTHL" to "128" which is the size of the encrypted data. Since
the rendezvous cookie changes each time Alice connects, replay attacks
can be easily prevented.
(1) Alice creates a private key e and sends the corresponding public key
d to Bob out of band.
(2) Alice generates a random rendezvous cookie r, computes PKSign(e, r),
encrypts it with Bob's fresh service key (see proposal 114), and
sends the result to Bob.
(3) Bob decrypts Alice's message using his private service key (see
proposal 114) and verifies PKSign(e, r) with d.
The premise for public-key authentication is that Alice must send the
generated public key to Bob outside Tor. If an attacker is able to swap
that key, the attacker could perform a man-in-the-middle attack, if he
managed to serve as an IPo for Bob. Therefore a secure exchange channel
must be established.
Depending on what authentication data Bob knows from Alice (password
and/or public key, or other data that is added later) there are several
choices for Alice to authenticate to the service.
After validating the provided "AUTHD" Bob builds a circuit to the
rendezvous point and starts interacting with Alice. If Bob cannot
identify the client he must refuse the request by not connecting to the
rendezvous point.
It will also still be possible to establish v2 hidden services without
authentication. Therefore the "AUTHT" field must be set to "0". "AUTHL"
and "AUTHD" are not provided by the client in that case.
/2/ Client authentication at the introduction point
In addition to authentication at the HS OP, the IPo should be able to
detect and abandon all unauthorized requests. This would help to raise
the level of privacy and therefore also the level of security for Bob by
better hiding his online activity from unauthorized users. Especially if
Alice still has access to the secret cookie. This can be the case if she
had access to the service earlier, but is no longer authorized or the
directory is outdated. Another advantage of this additional "gate keeper"
would be reduced traffic in the network, because unauthorized requests
could already be detected and declined at the IPo.
It is important to notice that the IPo may not be trustworthy, and
therefore can not replace authentication at the HS OP itself. Nor should
the IPo get hold of critical authentication information (because it could
try to access the service itself).
A challenge-response authentication protocol is used to address these
issues. This means that a challenge is needed to be solved by Alice to
get forwarded to Bob by the IPo.
Two types of authentication are supported and need to be preconfigured by
Bob when creating the service: password and public-key authentication.
Again it is up to Alice what kind of authentication mechanism she wants
to use, given that Bob knows both her password and her public key.
If Alice uses a password to authenticate herself at the IPo, the
authentication is based on a symmetric challenge-response authentication
protocol. In this case the challenge for Alice is to send h(x|y) where x
is a user-specific password, which should be different from the password
needed for authentication at the hidden service and y is a randomly
generated value. Alice gets hold of her password out of band.
With the initial RELAY_ESTABLISH_INTRO cell, the IPo gets a list of
h(x|y)'s which it stores locally. Upon a request of Alice it compares her
provided authentication data with the list entries. If there is a
matching entry in its list, Alice's request is valid and can be forwarded
to Bob. To generate the hash, Alice needs to know the password (which she
will get out of band) and the random value y. This value is contained in
the cookie-encrypted part of the hidden service descriptor which Alice
can retrieve from the directory using her secret cookie.
(1) Alice creates a password x and sends the password digest h(x) to Bob
out of band.
(2) Bob creates a random value y, computes h(h(x)|y), and sends the
result to the introduction point.
(3) Bob encrypts y with a secret cookie (see proposal 114) and writes it
to a rendezvous service descriptor.
(4) Alice fetches Bob's rendezvous service descriptor, decrypts y using
the secret cookie (see proposal 114), computes h(h(x)|y), encrypts
it with the public key of the introduction point, and sends it to
that introduction point.
(5) The introduction point decrypts h(h(x)|y) from Alice's message and
compares it to the value it knows from Bob (from step 2).
If Alice wants to use public-key authentication to authenticate herself
at Bob's HS, the challenge-response authentication protocol is slightly
different.
The IPo's are provided with a list of random value hashes h(r) with an
entry for each user via the RELAY_ESTABLISH_INTRO cell. For public-key
authentication Alice uses an RSA public/private-key pair (as specified in
tor-spec). The public key is made known to Bob out of band. The IPo's
will now be sent a new ESTABLISH_INTRO cell with an additional random
value hash for Alice and a new descriptor is uploaded to the responsible
directories. The public-key authentication part of the service descriptor
holds a blank separated list of key-value pairs with one pair for every
authorized user. The hash of the public key of a user serves as a key,
while the PK-encrypted r represents the value. Authorized users can now
find their respective key-value pair and decrypt the value of h(r). This
result serves as an authorization token at the IPo in the same way as
with password authentication. The IPo does not know which authentication
method was used since the tokens always have the same format.
(1) Alice creates a private key e and sends the corresponding public key
d to Bob out of band.
(2) Bob creates a random value y and sends it to the introduction point.
(3) Bob computes PKEncrypt(d, y), encrypts the result with a secret
cookie (see proposal 114), and writes it to a rendezvous service
descriptor.
(4) Alice fetches Bob's rendezvous service descriptor, decrypts
PKEncrypt(d, y) using the secret cookie (see proposal 114), decrypts
y from it using her private key e, and sends it to the introduction
point.
(5) The introduction point compares y with the value it knows from Bob
(from step 2).
To remove a user from a group, Bob needs to update the random value list
at the IPo's.
The changes needed in Tor to realize these two challenge-response
variations affect the RELAY_ESTABLISH_INTRO and RELAY_INTRODUCE1 relay
cells, the service descriptor and the code parts in Tor where these cells
and the descriptor are handled.
The RELAY_ESTABLISH_INTRO cell is now structured as follows:
V Format byte: set to 255 [1 octet]
V Version byte: set to 2 [1 octet]
KL Key length [2 octets]
PK Bob's public key [KL octets]
HS Hash of session info [20 octets]
AUTHT The auth type that is supported [1 octet]
AUTHL Length of auth data [2 octets]
AUTHD Auth data [variable]
SIG Signature of above information [variable]
"AUTHT" is set to "1" for password/public-key authentication.
"AUTHD" is a list of 20 octet long challenges for clients.
The service descriptor as specified in 114-distributed-storage is used in
our implementation.
For password authentication "authentication" auth-type is set to "1" and
auth-data contains the 20 octets long string used by clients to construct
the response to the challenge for authentication at the IPo.
When using public-key authentication the auth-type is set to "2" and
auth-data holds a list of 148 octets long blank separated values. The
first 20 octets of each value is the hash of the public key of a certain
client and used by Alice to determine her entry in the list. The
remaining 128 octets contain the PK-encrypted token needed to
authenticate to the IPo.
The part of the RELAY_INTRODUCE1 cell that can be read by the IPo has the
following fields added:
AUTHT The auth type that is supported [1 octet]
AUTHL Length of auth data [1 octets]
AUTHD Auth data [variable]
The AUTHT and AUTHL fields are provided to allow extensions of the
protocol. Currently, we set AUTHT to 1 for password/public-key
authentication and AUTHL to 20 for the length of the authorization token.
Security implications:
In addition to the security features proposed in 114-distributed-storage
a new way of authentication is added at the OP of Bob. Moreover, the
authentication at the IPo's is improved to support a fine-grained access
control. Corrupted IPo's may easily bypass this authentication, but given
the case that the majority of IPo's is acting as expected we still
consider this feature as being useful.
Bob can now decide whether he wants to allow Alice to use his services or
not. This gives him the possibility to offer his services only to known
and trusted users that need to identify by a password or by signing their
messages. The anonymity of the client towards the service provider is
thereby reduced to pseudonymity.
Changing of access rights now involves all three authorization authorities
depending on what changes should be made:
- The user configures his changes at the local OP. Therefore he can
edit the cookie files that were extended to support multiple users.
Moreover he can edit the new user files that were added to specify
authentication information for every user.
- Whenever local changes occur, this information needs to be either
passed to the responsible IPo's, the directory servers, or both
depending on the authorization method and operation used. It is
important to have consistent authorization results at all authorities
at the same time, to create a trustworthy system with good user
acceptance. As these reconfigurations always follow local changes
they can be done automatically by the new Tor implementation and
therefore no user interaction is needed.
- The secret cookies proposed in 114-distributed-storage are used for
group management in our implementation as their use would be far to
costly for a user-based authorization. That is because right now one
descriptor is generated and uploaded for every secret cookie. Changes
in this configuration should therefore be rare (maybe never) and only
a few groups should exist. Provided that this is the case the costs
for changes seem acceptable. As there is currently no possibility to
make a directory remove the descriptor for a group an updated
descriptor without any IPo should be uploaded to the directory
servers.
Local changes to access rights can now be done faster than by changing
service descriptors which reduces the directory server load and network
traffic. Still every configuration change remains costly and users should
carefully choose how detailed the access right configuration should be.
Attacking clients now need to bypass two more authentication steps to
reach the service implementation. Compared to the current state it is
more likely that attackers can be stopped even before they are able to
contact Bob's OP. We expect that the possibility of an attack is thereby
significantly reduced. Another positive side effect is that network
traffic and router load is reduced by discarding unauthorized cells which
should lower the effectiveness of denial of service attacks.
Compatibility:
When using our authentication for hidden services the implementation of
IPo's needs to be extended. Therefore we use version information provided
in router descriptors to be sure that we only send modified
RELAY_ESTABLISH_INTRO cells to routers that can handle them. Clients of
v2 hidden services will have to update their Tor installation if they
want to be able to use the service.
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