[tor-dev] Improving Tor Hidden Services

[Arturo Filastò]

Setting aside the issue related with usability there are also some
interesting
improvements that can be made to make Tor HS more performant.

I will summarize here the ideas that have been brought forward along
with some
that are not detailed anywhere and would like to see more interest in.

I would suggest to start collecting all the information regarded to Tor HS
improvements on this wiki page:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/roadmaps/Tor/HiddenServices.

With respect to what is already on that page I got some feedback from
rransom
on those two items on IRC, but I did not note them down. It would be
good if you
were to summarize the critiques here or on the wiki page.

Also there are a set of proposals that are related to Tor HS
improvements that
have been abandoned for some time and I believe it would be useful to
summarize
them inside of that wiki page.

The proposals are:

#121
Filename: 121-hidden-service-authentication.txt
Title: Hidden Service Authentication
https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/121-hidden-service-authentication.txt

#142
Filename: 142-combine-intro-and-rend-points.txt
Title: Combine Introduction and Rendezvous Points
https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/142-combine-intro-and-rend-points.txt

#143
Filename: 143-distributed-storage-improvements.txt
Title: Improvements of Distributed Storage for Tor Hidden Service
Descriptors
https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/143-distributed-storage-improvements.txt

#155
Filename: 155-four-hidden-service-improvements.txt
Title: Four Improvements of Hidden Service Performance
https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/155-four-hidden-service-improvements.txt

#194
Filename: 194-mnemonic-urls.txt
Title: Mnemonic .onion URLs
https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/194-mnemonic-urls.txt

and also this inside of the ideas, that is loosely related to #194, but
instead of offering
an encoding it offers a petname system:

Filename: xxx-onion-nyms.txt
Title: .onion nym system
https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/ideas/xxx-onion-nyms.txt

The single most important thing I believe is needed in Tor Hidden
Service is Encrypted services.
These can be seen, in a way, as the reverse of Tor2web mode. It allows
people to publish Hidden Services
with no anonymity, but have the Tor end-to-end encryption and
performance improvements.
I see these to be the future of what was previously done, poorly, with
Tor Exit Enclaves. One that
wishes to have an end-to-end encrypted tunnel from Tor clients can run
an encrypted service and have
a reduced number of hops from the IP and RP.

Roger started writing up a spec on this and it can be found here:

Filename: xxx-encrypted-services.txt
Title: Encrypted services as a replacement to exit enclaving
https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/ideas/xxx-encrypted-services.txt


- Art.