[tor-dev] Proposal 208: IPv6 Exits Redux

[Nick Mathewson]

Filename: 208-ipv6-exits-redux.txt
Title: IPv6 Exits Redux
Author: Nick Mathewson
Created: 10-Oct-2012
Status: Open
Target: 0.2.4.x


1. Obligatory Motivation Section

   [Insert motivations for IPv6 here.  Mention IPv4 address exhaustion.

   Insert official timeline for official IPv6 adoption here.

   Insert general desirability of being able to connect to whatever
   address there is here.

   Insert profession of firm conviction that eventually there will be
   something somebody wants to connect to which requires the ability to
   connect to an IPv6 address.]

2. Proposal

   Proposal 117 has been there since coderman wrote it in 2007, and it's
   still mostly right.  Rather than replicate it in full, I'll describe
   this proposal as a patch to it.

2.1. Exit policies

   Rather than specify IPv6 policies in full, we should move (as we have
   been moving with IPv4 addresses) to summaries of which IPv6 ports
   are generally permitted.  So let's allow server descriptors to include
   a list of accepted IPv6 ports, using the same format as the "p" line
   in microdescriptors, using the "ipv6-policy" keyword.

        "ipv6-policy" SP ("accept" / "reject") SP PortList NL

   Exits should still, of course, be able to configure more complex
   policies, but they should no longer need to tell the whole world
   about them.

   After this ipv6-policy line is validated, it should get copied into a
   "p6" line in microdescriptors.


   This change breaks the existing exit enclave idea for IPv6, but the
   exiting exit enclave implementation never worked right in the first
   place.  If we can come up with a good way to support it, we can add
   that back in.

2.2. Which addresses should we connect to?

   One issue that's tripped us up a few times is how to decide whether
   we can use IPv6 addresses.  You can't use them with SOCKS4 or
   SOCKS4a, IIUC.  With SOCKS5, there's no way to indicate that you
   prefer IPv4 or IPv6.  It's possible that some SOCKS5 users won't
   understand IPv6 addresses.

   With this in mind, I'm going to suggest that with SOCKS4 or SOCKS4a,
   clients should always require IPv4.  With SOCKS5, clients should
   accept IPv6.

   If it proves necessary, we can also add per-SOCKSPort configuration
   flags to override the above default behavior.

   See also partitioning discussion in Security Notes below.

2.3. Extending BEGIN cells.

   Prop117 (and the section above) says that clients should prefer one
   address or another, but doesn't give them a means to tell the exit to
   do so.  Here's one.

   We define an extension to the BEGIN cell as follows.  After the
   ADDRESS | ':' | PORT | [00] portion, the cell currently contains all
   [00] bytes.  We add a 32-bit flags field, stored as an unsigned 32
   bit value, after the [00].  All these flags default to 0, obviously.
   We define the following flags:

     bit
      1 -- IPv6 okay.  We support learning about IPv6 addresses and
           connecting to IPv6 addresses.
      2 -- IPv4 not okay.  We don't want to learn about IPv4 addresses
           or connect to them.
      3 -- IPv6 preferred.  If there are both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses,
           we want to connect to the IPv6 one.  (By default, we connect
           to the IPv4 address.)
      4..32 -- Reserved.

   As with so much else, clients should look at the platform version of
   the exit they're using to see if it supports these flags before
   sending them.

2.4. Minor changes to proposal 117

   GETINFO commands that return an address, and which should return two,
   should not in fact begin returning two addresses separated by CRLF.
   They should retain their current behavior, and there should be a new
   "all my addresses" GETINFO target.

3. Security notes:

   Letting clients signal that they want or will accept IPv6 addresses
   creates two partitioning issues that didn't exist before.  One is the
   version partitioning issue: anybody who supports IPv6 addresses is
   obviously running the new software.  Another is option partitioning:
   anybody who is using a SOCKS4a application will look different from
   somebody who is using a SOCKS5 application.

   We can't do much about version partitioning, I think.  If we felt
   especially clever, we could have a flag day.  Is that necessary?

   For option partitioning, are there many applications whose behavior
   is indistinguishable except that they are sometimes configured to use
   SOCKS4a and sometimes to use SOCKS5?  If so, the answer may well be
   to persuade as many users as possible to switch those to SOCKS5, so
   that they get IPv6 support and have a large anonymity set.



   IPv6 addresses are plentiful, which makes caching them dangerous
   if you're hoping to avoid tracking over time.  (With IPv4 addresses,
   it's harder to give every user a different IPv4 address for a target
   hostname with a long TTL, and then accept connections to those IPv4
   addresses from different exits over time.  With IPv6, it's easy.)
   This makes proposal 205 especially necessary here.