Tim Wilson-Brown - teor <teor2...@gmail.com> writes: > [ text/plain ] > Hi All, > > I'm working on proposal 260's Rendezvous Single Onion Services in #17178. > > They are faster, because they have one hop between the service and the > introduction and rendezvous points. > But this means that their location is easy to discover (non-anonymous). > So we want to come up with a design that makes it hard to configure a > non-anonymous service by accident. > > Here's a cut-down version of an email I sent to tor-onions for feedback, for > those who are on both lists: > > Nick's concern was that users could configure Single Onion Services without > realising that it provides no server location anonymity. > I initially thought we could change the torrc option name to make this clear. > ... > I now believe that trying to overload the name of a feature with warnings > about its downsides was a mistake. … > > This would mean that Single Onion Service operators would include in their > torrc: > > SingleOnionMode 1 > HiddenServiceDir … > ... > > As a separate issue, I think there are two alternative designs that can > prevent users from configuring the feature and then exposing their location > unintentionally: > > Tor2WebMode requires users to add a compilation option: --enable-tor2web-mode > We could do this with Single Onion Services as well: > --enable-single-onion-mode > If SingleOnionMode is configured without the compilation option, tor warns > the user and refuses to start. > When it is configured, tor warns the user they're non-anonymous, then starts. > However, using a compilation option makes the feature harder to test. > And Tor2Web operators already don't like having to compile separate binaries. > It's likely Single Onion operators would feel similarly. > > Alternately, we could add a torrc option: NonAnonymousMode > If SingleOnionMode is configured without NonAnonymousMode, tor warns the user > and refuses to start. > When it is configured, tor warns the user they're non-anonymous, then starts. > > I spoke with Nick on IRC and he's happy with either of these options. > > I'd like to proceed with the NonAnonymousMode torrc option, unless there are > compelling reasons against that design. > I hope that this will allow us to get SingleOnionMode merged early in tor > 0.2.9. >
I think I like this approach more than complicating the torrc option name! Coming up with a warning message for people who forget to enable NonAnonymousMode seems easier than trying to fit that warning message in a torrc option name. _______________________________________________ tor-dev mailing list tor-dev@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev
