BenTasker.co.uk

Web2Tor and Tor2Web are reverse proxies which allows clearnet users to access Tor Onion Sites (AKA Hidden Services), and there are a variety of services available online (such as onion.to, onion.cab, onion.city and onion direct) running this service.

This post details why using these is such a bad idea, as well as detailing some of the changes I'm making to the site to help discourage use of these services.

Tor Hidden Services are accessed through a web address ending in .onion. Generally speaking these appear to be random strings of letters and numbers, though they're actually a representation of the public key generated when the operator created their hidden service.

It is possible, however, to attempt to generate a keypair which will allow you to generate a desired vanity URL, though the process is essentially a brute-force of key combinations, so may take some time.

The level of effort required to set up a TOR Hidden Service (known as a .onion) largely relates to the amount of paranoia you need to exercise regarding your anonymity.

Whilst the ins and outs of Operational Security (Op-Sec) are a little too intricate for a single post, this documentation will take you through the steps required to configure a Debian server to host a .onion site with reasonable protections in place.

Bentasker.co.uk has been multihomed on Tor and the WWW for over 5 years now.

Over that time, things have changed slightly - at first, although the site was multi-homed, the means of discovery really was limited to noticing the "Browse via Tor" link in the privacy bar on the right hand side of your screen (unless you're on a mobile device...).

When Tor Browser pulled in Firefox's changes to implement support for RFC 7838 Alt-Svc headers, I added support for that too. Since that change, quite a number of Tor Browser Bundle users have connected to me via Onion Services without even knowing they had that additional protection (and were no longer using exit bandwidth).

The real benefit of the Alt-Svc method, other than it being transparent, is that your browser will receive and validate the SSL cert for my site - the user will know they're hitting the correct endpoint, rather than some imposter wrapper site.

Which brings us to today.

Tor have released a new version - 9.5 - of Tor Browser bundle which implements new functionality: Onion Location