> From reading on OnionCat , the clients are essentially hidden services > once a connection is made it is bidirectional.
No, OC is just a daemon shuffling data back and forth across a Tor HiddenServicePort. Tor provides a bidir return path to the source, which the listener (OC) can use, if it thinks it should... > If A initiates a connection > to B , A can be sure he/she is talking to B Yes, up to the 80-bit addressing of Tor. OC translates your request for a v6 address into an onion address and puts that stream through Tor. > but the opposite isnt true .So > if B has to sure he/she is indeed talking to A , he/she has to initiate a > connection to A [..... to query and confirm it .....]. Yes. Because B's onion is seeing no onion source address. And B's OC is seeing an arbitrary v6 source address. Since most protocols require a reverse channel, it's actually B that is more at risk of sending their data off to onions unknown. Luckily, that is where B (if human and not a dolt) usually notices something is broken and quits it. And it's kind of pointless to do such spoofing because if A wanted B's return stream, it should have just asked for it. So it would just be for the lol's of A blindly convincing B (or B's computer, app, etc) to disclose something to C. > Which is what torchat does to authenticate both the parties > , even if OnionCat is being used the same has to be done to ensure both the > people know who they are talking to. Am I right in my observation ?? Yes, and as before, OC had plans to do a little OCtoOC ping pong too. If running IPSEC, etc over v6, learning or making stashes of source key-v6 associations, that might do it too, more work, same thing. OC is just another app that plugs into Tor, no different than TorChat. It just happens to present the user with a cool and immensely useful v6 address instead of a cute little chat prompt. *********************************************************************** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with unsubscribe or-talk in the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/