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The “.onion” Special-Use Domain Name (2015)
- hackuser 10y agoFrom 2015
- superkuh 10y agoYep. The author, Appelbaum, is no longer with Tor after falling victim to one of the many successful culture-based attacks on privacy and free software groups in 2015/2016.
- nerdponx 10y agoYou're gonna have to explain that a little.
- loeg 10y agoMuch of the context can be found here: http://jacobappelbaum.net/ http://jacobappelbaum.net/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum#Allegations_of_sexual_misconduct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum#Allegations_of... .
- Natsu 10y agoI don't know any of the people involved, but this part always struck me as being pretty odd: ==== On 10 June, Jill Bähring, a woman whom three witnesses claimed to have seen being abused,[92] flatly denied the abuse allegations.[101] In a statement released by Gizmodo journalist William Turton, Bähring wrote: "Reading this highly distorted version of my experience, which is being used as one of the 'bulletproof examples' of Jacob's alleged misbehavior, I can’t help but wonder. Wonder about all the stories that have been published the last days. Wonder not only about mob justice on twitter, caused by rumors and speculation, but also about the accounts repeated by those who call themselves journalists. Wonder about how many other stories have been willingly misinterpreted. Wonder about the witnesses in all these stories, who coincidentally always seem to consist of the same set of people. Wonder about their motive to speak on my behalf without my consent."[102][103]
- drinkjuice 10y agohttps://github.com/Enegnei/JacobAppelbaumLeavesTor/blob/master/JacobAppelbaumLeavesTor.md https://github.com/Enegnei/JacobAppelbaumLeavesTor/blob/mast...
- dqv 10y agoSee: https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ Which is the method governments use to fracture projects and communities. It has been theorized that a state actor orchestrated an attack on Appelbaum to oust him from the Tor project (1) to discredit him as an authoritative journalistic source [1: Appelbaum was one of the individuals given access to the Snowden documents]; and (2) to gain more control of the Tor project to introduce vulnerabilities. The events leading up to his ejection had a striking resemblance to the JTRIG manipulation tactics. It's very possible that Appelbaum was a bad actor, exploiting his credibility, but it's also highly suspect that these accusations came to light so late into his life. It seems that, prior to the release of the accusations, someone would have at least suggested that he was sexually exploitative. Yet, there doesn't seem to exist even a peep of anything close to misconduct. It's why these manipulation tactics are so surprisingly effective. Who should be believed? There's a strong moral dogma that suggests we should immediately assume that the accusations are truth, [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum#Journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum#Journalism
- dannypgh 10y agoThis is late into his life? Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Bill Cosby both exist, FYI.
- gohrt 10y agoThey were attacks on violations of the community's sexual morality, not attacks on privacy and free software.
- harry8 10y agoI don't know Mr Appelbaum at all, I do know trial by twitter, mob justice, unsubstantiated claims, authority claiming to have secret evidence and pronouncing someone guilty when I see it. I don't find any of that at all helpful in assessing someone's guilt or innocence. I don't have an opinion on guilt or innocence in the absence of evidence at all. I do note that at least some of the unsubstantiated accusations do seem to now have found substance as being made without the alleged victim's knowledge or consent and the alleged victim has denied the accusation in its entirety. The second time that happened I felt there is something not quite right going on. There's a distinct smell. Just what that is and why is a matter for speculation.
- metroidfan832 10y agoAppelbaum's relationship with Tor is well documented. I'm not sure why this post is downvoted so much. Social attacks against privacy enhancing OSS tools such as Tor, Tox, and Bitcoin have been well documented on popular forums.
- stretchwithme 10y agoI thought for sure that was going to be a TLD devoted to satire :-)
- cmrx64 10y agoI'm curious why they decided on a "special-use domain name" instead of something like "onion://hash".
- vortico 10y agoThis committee recognizes what already exists. onion://hash is not used because .onion domains are not different protocols (they're still http) but are a specially allocated space of hostnames representing the "addresses" of Tor servers.
- niij 10y ago.onion domains can use any service they like and are not limited to just HTTP. These are all valid: ssh://abc123.onion ftp://abc123.onion https://abc123.onion https://abc123.onion
- eriknstr 10y agoIt was a long time ago that TOR chose to do so. I also think TLD makes sense anyway. TOR is a network and the protocol of the traffic that is relayed through it is independent of the transport.
- AgentME 10y agoOnion addresses describe a host that can be talked to via TCP, not just HTTP.
- zrm 10y agoBecause https://*.onion https://*.onion and ftps://*.onion are different. And it lets you do things like tor2web by just appending a DNS domain to the end of the onion domain, without requiring any special client support. And more things break on unexpected protocols than unexpected names.
- cmrx64 10y agoThat makes sense. I wasn't aware of the details, but looking into it now, "onion"/hidden services are a way of establishing tor circuits which are then used normally. Thanks!
- eriknstr 10y agoAbout time (even though it was in 2015). I was afraid that someone was going to buy .onion and use it to deanonymize people who thought they were on TOR when they were not.
- vortico 10y agoTHIS is the important point of this post. It might be "cool" that they now recognize the TLD now, but I can't imagine the chaos it would cause if .onion was purchased.
- sandworm101 10y agoThere were plans for that contigency. Tor would have moved to some other tld (ie .onionland). The tor browser bundle would update bookmarks and probably issue a warning for .onion addresses. Annoyance but not chaos.
- dawnerd 10y agoI think the fear would be from people not familiar enough with tor to think any ol' .onion link was anonymous.
- temprature 10y agoThis can already happen with existing TLDs, for example: https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion.link https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion.link DDG themselves used to link to that URL in thee instant answer box if you searched for "duckduckgo onion", and I don't think anyone who isn't familiar with TLDs and Tor would realise what is happening there.
- TomMarius 10y agoNot everyone updates immediately, or even has access to updates.
- agildehaus 10y agoMany web browsers have predictive services built-in to the address bar. Some are even enabled by default. Google has undoubtedly seen .onion addresses submitted.
- rektide 10y agoFWIW this came after a long long period of the DNSOP working group throwing hate and venom on this form of hithertofore non-normative DNS use cases. This was a very hot topic and it seemed like absolutely no progress was going to be made making this happen for a long time due to the DNSOPS wg. I don't have good citations- would love to gather them again- but it was only after other IETF members started questioning the absurd rejectionist behavior of the DNSOP working group that this changed, and the .onion draft was allowed to get due status. I can't think of any case in IETF history of a draft being so hotly denied and rejected. Very interesting story, look forward to someone telling it better than I.
- wereHamster 10y agoWho are the people in the DNSOP WG? Which companies do they work for? And why do these companies reject the RFC?
- nl 10y agoMuch of the time the people on IETF WGs have been on them for years through multiple companies. There are exceptions, but often this rejectionist-type behavior isn't because of some kind of corporate influence, it is because the new thing doesn't match what these people think should be done.
- mastax 10y ago> I don't have good citations- would love to gather them again Here's a good place to start for anyone interested: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/search/?email_list=dnsop&q=onion&gbt=1&index=4dMYqpyFXWf7QlGMtTjL6ZLNK7I https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/search/?email_list=dnsop&q...
- chatmasta 10y agoMan, sometimes I wonder if in 20-30 years there will be anyone left who is this passionate about such seemingly obscure topics. The Internet owes much of its success to these people.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoApplications that do not implement the Tor protocol SHOULD generate an error upon the use of .onion and SHOULD NOT perform a DNS lookup. Wait, does this mean that all my applications that deal with URLs now have to check for and reject entries that use .onion domain?
- Jarwain 10y agoI'd think, for the most part, it would act like using a typical invalid URL and throw an error. Special cases would be, say, Chrome rejecting .onions instead of doing a search
- jdiez17 10y agoOnly applications that actually access URLs would need to generate an error. In practice, your code doesn't need to know about .onion domains - but network libraries like libcurl do.
- andreareina 10y agoAbstractly something on layer 7 of the OSI model shouldn't care exactly how the data is being routed, but the security considerations of using TOR breaks the abstraction. A naïve client could be made to leak identifying information through any number of side-channels. Since the lower layers can't have a whitelist of acceptable applications to connect to .onion addresses, the applications themselves must voluntarily refrain from connecting. This is like the prevailing wisdom to check malloc's return value, not storing passwords in the database, not rolling your own crypto, etc. except that in this case it actually got included in the standard. Unfortunately like all those other things, there's nothing that actually prevents a programmer from breaking the rules.
- jstanley 10y agoYou don't have to. The reason to do so is to protect your user's privacy (i.e. so that their DNS server doesn't see what onion addresses they were trying to visit).
- dheera 10y agoWhat is this nonsense? A domain iooks up to an IP address (and some other things). DNS does not and should not care about what protocols are going to be used with said IP address. I can use an .onion domain for unencrypted Telnet as root with no password if I want. It's stupid but that's not something that should be restricted at a DNS level.
- avar 10y agoRelevant: A draft RFC for an X.alt tld, so in the future the next thing like the next X.onion would be X.onion.alt instead, with X.oninon not expected to change due to backwards compatibility: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wkumari-dnsop-alt-tld-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wkumari-dnsop-alt-tld-00
- wccrawford 10y agoThe idea that we're treating name resolution differently by different applications is... Crazy. I can't even begin to imagine all the ways that is going to fail. The idea that users would have to be careful not to enter a .onion domain into non-TOR software is also crazy. Of course they're going to do this, and they're going to do it often. And relying on applications not to asking publicly for resolution for .onion domains is laughable. It's going to happen a lot. As others have noted, they should have implemented new protocol names instead. All existing software that doesn't follow these rules would simply do nothing (or return an error, as is appropriate) and only applications with actual support would attempt to do anything.
- AndyMcConachie 10y agoA couple of things you may be interested in reading. http://www.verisign.com/assets/labs/Measuring-the-Leakage-of-Onion-at-the-Root.pdf http://www.verisign.com/assets/labs/Measuring-the-Leakage-of... https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/sac-090-en.pdf https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/sac-090-en.pdf
- belorn 10y agoThere exist several other and older top level domains which should never be publicly resolved. .localhost, .example, .invalid, and .test are a few domains which most resolvers (and even operative systems) know to not try resolve. .local, is an new one which zeroconf is primary responsible to resolve. To go to the extreme of having no such reserved domains would be crazy and way too much existing software would break spectacularly if anyone tried. rfc6761 is simply an update to rfc2606, by extending the concept of the reserved names like .localhost to names like .local or .onion.
- drvdevd 10y agoOf course this sounds like the right engineering approach, but perhaps fitting that into the browser use case was not possible in a manner suitable for the Tor project? After all, the primary interface to the Tor network for most users is their browser. [edit] meant to add: of course you could add a new protocol, but then that would imply browser modifications, right?
- robert_foss 10y agoBundled with the .onion application was originally .i2p and .gnu applications as well. Only after the Tor project unbundled the non .onion TLDs was any progress made. After the .onion TLD had been accepted the process by which these special (reserved TLDs) were registered at the IETF was removed. The IETF bent over backwards not to include anyone and when they did they only allowed for a single TLD to be reserved before closing the special (reserved) TLD application process. Mind you that .gnu and .i2p applied on the exact same grounds and even on the exact same application originally. I have never been in contact with a more dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization.
- nerdponx 10y agoWhy are they so hostile to these requests?
- gulaschbrot 10y agoI guess because you cannot make money selling reserved special use domain names.
- robert_foss 10y agoI can't tell you why, but I suspect a reluctance to do anything new.
- hobarrera 10y agoThis is really cool, and I really hope that resolvers adopt this --- which basically means dropping any queries for `.onion` to avoid leaking that a client attempted to resolve such a domain.