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IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Contents | Zoom in | Zoom out For navigation instructions please click here Search Issue | Next Page Policing Privacy ■ Dynamic Cloud Certifi cation ■ Security for High-Risk Users IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy March/April 2016 Vol. 14, No. 2 Contents | Zoom in | Zoom out For navigation instructions please click here Search Issue | Next Page IEEE qM qMqM SECURITY&PRIVACY Previous Page | Contents | Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page qMqM THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND® IEEE SYMPOSIUM ON SECURITY AND PRIVACY Bake in .onion for Tear-Free and Stronger Website Authentication Paul Syverson | US Naval Research Laboratory Grif n Boyce | Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Although their inherent authentication properties are generally overlooked in the shadow of the network-address hiding they provide, Tor’s .onion services might just deliver stronger website authentication than existing alternatives. or is a widely popular infrastructure for anony- create website authentication, integrity, and other guar- Tmous communication (www.torproject.org). antees more simply, easily, fully, and inexpensively than Millions of people use Tor’s thousands of relays for by currently available means. unfet ered, traf c-secure Internet access. Approximately 95 percent of Tor bandwidth traf c is on circuits con- Tor and Onion Services: necting Tor clients to servers that are otherwise acces- A Brief Background sible on the Internet.1 Tor also provides protocols for In this article, we sketch the basics of Tor onion ser- connecting to services on its reserved top-level domain vices. For more details, we refer readers to Roger Din- .onion, which are only accessible via Tor. gledine and his colleagues’ Tor design paper,2 the Tor Tor’s .onion design continues the original onion- Project’s high-level graphical description of onion ser- routing idea of protecting not only clients’ but also serv- vices (www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html ers’ network location information.2,3 Research to date .en),__ and related documentation on the Tor homepage has been so focused on the location-hiding aspects of (www.torproject.org). T e “Tor Rendezvous Speci- onionsites and services that it simply calls them “hidden f cation” also provides a more up-to-date and much servers.” T e popular press sometimes uses “Dark Web” more technical description of onion service protocols to refer to onionsites, but more of en than not, usage (https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree of that term is misleading or incoherent. Because spies /rend-spec.txt)._________ and criminals at ack users from hiding spots through- Tor clients randomly select three of the roughly out the infrastructure on today’s Internet, rather than 7,400 Tor relays to create a cryptographic circuit to con- being dark, Tor’s authenticated routing overlay typi- nect to Internet services (h___________________t ps://metrics.torproject.org cally provides users the only visibility of or control over /networksize.html).___________ Because only the f rst relay in the where their traf c goes. T us, we challenge the common circuit sees the client’s IP address and only the last (exit) narrow view of onionsites. In this article, we explore relay sees the destination’s IP address, identif cation is how individuals might use Tor’s .onion infrastructure to separated from routing. To of er an onion service, a Web 1540-7993/16/$33.00 © 2016 IEEE Copublished by the IEEE Computer and Reliability Societies March/April 2016 15 IEEE qM qMqM SECURITY&PRIVACY Previous Page | Contents | Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page qMqM THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND® IEEE qM qMqM SECURITY&PRIVACY Previous Page | Contents | Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page qMqM THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND® IEEE SYMPOSIUM ON SECURITY AND PRIVACY (or other) server creates Tor circuits to multiple intro- be returned by some other, possibly malicious, server. duction points that await clients’ connection atempts. In addition to the integrity guarantee, users rely on Clients wanting to connect to a particular onion service authentication so that their queries are revealed only use the onion address to look up its introduction points to DuckDuckGo. Te onion address alone doesn’t in a directory. In a successful interaction, clients and ofer this. Using the traditional Web trust infrastruc- onionsites both create Tor circuits to a client-selected ture, Facebook ofers a DigiCert certifcate for its onion rendezvous point. Te rendezvous point mates their cir- addresses to ensure that users aren’t misled by onion- cuits, which then interact over the rendezvous circuit sites purporting to be ofcial. like ordinary Web clients and servers. Although cryptographic binding is essential to Because a properly confgured onionsite commu- the technical mechanisms of trust, users also rely nicates only over the Tor circuits it creates, this proto- on human-readable familiarity, for example, that the col hides its network location"thus the name “hidden browser indicates graphically that they’ve made a service.” But the .onion system has other important fea- certifed encrypted connection as a result of typing tures, including self-authentication. Te onion address “facebook.com” into the browser. To some extent, it’s is actually a hash of the onionsite’s public key. For possible to make use of this familiarity in onionspace. example, if users want to connect to the DuckDuckGo By generating many keys whose hash had “facebook” (htps://duckduckgo.com) search engine’s onion ser- as the initial string and then searching the full hashes vice, they use the address 3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion. for an adequately felicitous result, Facebook obtained Te Tor client, recognizing this as an onion address, the facebookcorewwwi.onion address. However, this knows to use the above protocol rather than pass the method won’t work widely, because it’s difcult to gen- address through a Tor circuit for DNS resolution at the erate custom addresses in this way. exit. Avoiding a DNS resolution outside the Tor net- Te Onion Name System is an atempt at a system work protects against leakage of client interests by pre- for globally unique but still human-meaningful onion- venting observation of DNS lookups as well as against site names.4 Tis has the advantage of not depend- any of the well-known DNS hijinks, such as redirec- ing on existing naming schemes, such as the domain tion by ISPs or rogue DNS servers and cache poison- registration system. Nevertheless, we can leverage the ing. Te public key corresponds to the key that signs efective usage and infrastructure that existing nam- the directory system’s list of introduction points and ing approaches have evolved through experience and other service descriptor information. In this way, onion design. We focus herein on approaches that link onion addresses are self-authenticating. addresses to already meaningful ways of referring to For services such as DuckDuckGo, the onion ser- sites. In particular, we focus on a case in which an indi- vice’s value lies not in its location hiding but in the Tor vidual controls a registered domain name, although it’s connection’s additional authentication and assurance also possible to bind to other meaningful Web locations of improved route security. Because the Tor circuits such as a Facebook page or WordPress blog. necessary to reach introduction and rendezvous points If you have a registered domain name, why not just are there to protect the confdentiality of server net- obtain certifcates from traditional authorities, as Face- work location, their complexity, latency, and network book has done? For many server operators, geting even overhead aren’t needed to provide improved authen- a basic server certifcate is just too much of a hassle. tication or route security. Nonetheless, there are per- Te application process can be confusing. It usually formance advantages to providing an onion service to costs money. It’s tricky to install correctly. It’s a pain to users wanting to connect to a site via Tor (for example, update.5 Tese are not original observations. Indeed, skirting the efects of exit relay bandwidth scarcity). that description is actually a quote from Josh Aas’s frst And Tor proposals (the Tor equivalent of the Internet blog entry for Let’s Encrypt, a new certifcate authority Engineering Task Force’s [IETF’s] RFCs) to standard- dedicated, among other things, to making TLS certifca- ize simplifed onion services without location hiding tion free and automatic for most websites. are underway. Facebook’s onion service already uses Seting up a certifcate using the existing X.509 such simplifcations. public-key infrastructure system can take hours or even days. When a collective or organization operates Knowing to Which Self to Be True the website, SSL/TLS certifcates have been known to DuckDuckGo’s onion address is self-authenticating take months because of ownership and authorization in that it binds the service descriptor information to questions. Tis time cost is in addition to the certif- 3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion. Presumably, users want cate’s monetary cost, if any. In contrast, seting up an assurance that they’re reaching DuckDuckGo and onionsite takes a few minutes and costs nothing. Once receiving DuckDuckGo search results, not what might Tor is installed, you simply add two lines to your torrc 16 IEEE Security & Privacy March/April 2016 IEEE qM qMqM SECURITY&PRIVACY Previous Page | Contents | Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page qMqM THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND® IEEE qM qMqM SECURITY&PRIVACY Previous Page | Contents | Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page qMqM THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND® f le to def ne where Tor will store the onion service’s validation (DV) certif cates, which typically require a key information and port, if necessary.
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