Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2015 17:26:25 +0100 From: Mike Hearn <[email protected]>
Two simple fixes for the case of non-anonymous services: 1) Don't use onion addresses. For non-anonymous services it's just being used as a hack around the difficulty of reliably identifying Tor connections. Otherwise you could just tell users to browse to tor.facebook.com and then the server would give an error page if you weren't coming from an exit. It'd be faster too. The name tor.facebook.com is not self-authenticating, which is the main practically useful function of .onion names. 2) Use an EV certificate so the browser shows the true name of the service in the address bar. Chrome will show it in green next to the address, Safari will actually show the organisation name instead of the URL, thus solving the issue completely. Facebook can afford an EV certificate. I can't -- and much of my motivation for using self-authenticating names is to avoid relying on the thousands of independent single points of failure that make up the HTTPS CA racket. (Facebook can also afford to ask Google to do certificate pinning in Chromium for facebookcorewwwi.onion, in order to sidestep thousands of points of failure, but again, I can't.) For decades browsers have been able to record for us hard-to-remember strings of letters and symbols for future reference, namely bookmarks. Perhaps browsers should not only let us invoke bookmarks, but also visually distinguish whether the we are looking at a bookmarked .onion or not. _______________________________________________ Messaging mailing list [email protected] https://moderncrypto.org/mailman/listinfo/messaging
