Nine Questions about Hidden Services

This is an interview with a Tor developer who works on hidden services. Please note that Tor Browser and hidden services are two different things. Tor Browser (downloadable at TorProject.org) allows you to browse, or surf, the web, anonymously. A hidden service is a site you visit or a service you use that uses Tor technology to stay secure and, if the owner wishes, anonymous. The secure messaging app ricochet is an example of a hidden service. Tor developers use the terms "hidden services" and "onion services" interchangeably.  1. What are your priorities for onion services development?  Personally I think it’s very important to work on the security of hidden services; that’s a big priority. The plan for the next generation of onion services includes enhanced security as well as improved performance. We’ve broken the development down into smaller modules and we’re already starting to build the foundation. The whole thing is a pretty insane engineering job.2. What don't people know about onion Services? Until earlier this year, hidden services were a labor of love that Tor developers did in their spare time. Now we have a very small group of developers, but in 2016 we want to move the engineering capacity a bit farther out. There is a lot of enthusiasm within Tor for hidden services but we need funding and more high level developers to build the next generation. 3. What are some of Tor's plans for mitigating attacks? The CMU attack was fundamentally a "guard node" attack; guard nodes are the first hop of a Tor circuit and hence the only part of the network that can see the real IP address of a hidden service. Last July we fixed the attack vector that CMU was using (it was called the RELAY_EARLY confirmation attack) and since then we've been divising improved designs for guard node security. For example, in the past, each onion service would have three guard nodes assigned to it. Since last September, each onion service only uses one guard node—-it exposes itself to fewer relays. This change alone makes an attack against an onion service much less likely. Several of our developers are thinking about how to do better guard node selection. One of us is writing code on this right now. We are modeling how onion services pick guard nodes currently, and we're simulating other ways to do it to see which one exposes itself to fewer relays—the fewer relays you are exposed to, the safer you are. We’ve also been working on other security things as well. For instance, a series of papers and talks have abused the directory system of hidden services to try to estimate the activity of particular hidden services, or to launch denial-of-service attacks against hidden services.We’re going to fix this by making it much harder for the attacker's nodes to become the responsible relay of a hidden service (say, catfacts) and be able to track uptime and usage information. We will use a "distributed random number generator"--many computers teaming up to generate a single, fresh unpredictable random number.  Another important thing we're doing is to make it impossible for a directory service to harvest addresses in the new design. If you don't know a hidden service address, then under the new system, you won't find it out just by hosting its HSDir entry. There are also interesting performance things: We want to make .onion services scalable in large infrastructures like Facebook--we want high availability and better load balancing; we want to make it serious.[Load balancing distributes the traffic load of a website to multiple servers so that no one server gets overloaded with all the users. Overloaded servers stop responding and create other problems. An attack that purposely overloads a website to cause it to stop responding is called a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.  - Kate] There are also onion services that don’t care to stay hidden, like Blockchain or Facebook; we can make those much faster, which is quite exciting. Meanwhile Nick is working on a new encryption design--magic circuit crypto that will make it harder to do active confirmation attacks. [Nick Mathewson is the co-founder of the Tor Project and the chief architect of our software.] Active confirmation attacks are much more powerful than passive attacks, and we can do a better job at defending against them. A particular type of confirmation attack that Nick's new crypto is going to solve is a "tagging attack"—Roger wrote a blog post about them years ago called, "One Cell Is Enough"—it was about how they work and how they are powerful. 4. Do you run an onion service yourself?   Yes, I do run onion services; I run an onion services on every box I have.  I connect to the PC in my house from anywhere in the world through SSH—I connect to my onion service instead of my house IP. People can see my laptop accessing Tor but don’t know who I am or where I go.  Also, onion services have a property called NAT-punching; (NAT=Network Address Translation). NAT blocks incoming connections;it builds walls around you. Onion services have NAT punching and can penetrate a firewall. In my university campus, the firewall does not allow incoming connections to my SSH server, but with an onion service the firewall is irrelevant. 5. What is your favorite onion service that a nontechnical person might use?  I use ricochet for my peer to peer chatting--It has a very nice UI and works well. 6. Do you think it’s safe to run an onion service?  It depends on your adversary. I think onion services provide adequate security against most real life adversaries.However, if a serious and highly motivated adversary were after me, I would not rely solely on the security of onion services. If your adversary can wiretap the whole Western Internet, or has a million dollar budget, and you only depend on hidden services for your anonymity then you should probably up your game. You can add more layers of anonymity by buying the servers you host your hidden service on anonymously (e.g. with bitcoin) so that even if they deanonymize you, they can't get your identity from the server. Also studying and actually understanding the Tor protocol and its threat model is essential practice if you are defending against motivated adversaries.7. What onion services don’t exist yet that you would like to see?  Onion services right now are super-volatile; they may appear for three months and then they disappear. For example, there was a Twitter clone, Tor statusnet; it was quite fun--small but cozy. The guy or girl who was running it couldn’t do it any longer. So, goodbye! It would be very nice to have a Twitter clone in onion services. Everyone would be anonymous. Short messages by anonymous people would be an interesting thing. I would like to see apps for mobile phones using onion services more—SnapChat over Tor, Tinder over Tor—using Orbot or whatever.  A good search engine for onion services. This volatility comes down to not having a search engine—you could have a great service, but only 500 sketchoids on the Internet might know about it. Right now, hidden services are misty and hard to see, with the fog of war all around. A sophisticated search engine could highlight the nice things and the nice communities; those would get far more traffic and users and would stay up longer. The second question is how you make things. For many people, it’s not easy to set up an onion service. You have to open Tor, hack some configuration files, and there's more.We need a system where you double click, and bam, you have an onion service serving your blog. Griffin Boyce is developing a tool for this named Stormy. If we have a good search engine and a way for people to start up onion services easily, we will have a much nicer and more normal Internet in the onion space.  8. What is the biggest misconception about onion services?  People don't realize how many use cases there are for onion services or the inventive ways that people are using them already. Only a few onion services ever become well known and usually for the wrong reasons. I think it ties back to the previous discussion--—the onion services we all enjoy have no way of getting to us. Right now, they are marooned on their island of hiddenness.  9. What is the biggest misconception about onion services development? It’s a big and complex project—it’s building a network inside a network; building a thing inside a thing. But we are a tiny team. We need the resources and person power to do it.  

(Interview conducted by Kate Krauss)