[tor-dev] On picking Introduction Points in Next Generation Hidden Services

Fri Aug 15 16:49:48 UTC 2014

On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 02:05:49PM +0300, George Kadianakis wrote:
> One missing piece of rend-spec-ng.txt [0] is a section on how HSes
> should pick their Introduction Points (IPs). There are three main
> questions here:
> - How many IPs should an HS have?
> - Which relays can be IPs?
> - What's the lifetime of an IP?
> 

--Snip-- 

> ==How many IPs should an HS have?==
> 
>   Now let's investigate how many IPs an HS should have.
>   
>   The current situation is that HSes attempt to estimate their own
>   popularity [2], and then they launch a number of IPs between 3 and 10
>   depending on how popular they think they are. FWIW, we don't really
>   understand whether the formula works properly [3].
>   
>   There are a few options for the future here:
>   
>   a) Fix the formula and keep number of IPs dynamic based on the
>      popularity of the HS.
>   
>      This is not a bad idea. However, we should make sure that from the
>      number of IPs you can't easily derive the number of clients of the
>      HS. Also we should make sure that the formula works properly.
>   
>   b) Have a static amount of IPs per HS. For example '5' of them.
> 
>      I'm not sure what kind of calculations we need to do to find the
>      right constant here (same for the (a) option).
>   
>   c) Have a static amount of IPs per HS, but also allow this to be
>      configurable by the HS operator.
>   
>      The idea here is that popular HSes can pump up the number of IPs
>      to make the service more reachable. It's worth noting that HSes
>      who do so will stand out as manually configured; not sure if any
>      other partition attacks can happen here. Also, there is also the
>      danger of all HS operators thinking they are special and pumping
>      the number of IPs to 42.

There's also the choice "ac) allow the HS operator to set a fixed
number or allow them to set an upper limit of IPs and let Tor
dynamically allocate them depending on popularity".
Many choices :)

Something else we can consider is publishing multiple versions of the
HS descriptor, each containing a subset of IPs. An adversary will need
to collect them all to see the full picture and know how popular the
HS thinks it is. On the other hand, it is likely better for a HS
operator to simply add more HS addresses when their popularity
increases. This decreases the usability of the HS, though, and relies
on users understanding why they should uniformly distribute their
connections over the various connections.

>   
>   Generally, we want to have a healthy amount of IPs (so that they
>   don't get DoSed, and that requests get load balanced nicely), but
>   also not too many because every HS having many IP circuits will put
>   a load to the network (especially with services like Torchat where
>   each client is an HS), and also because we want to avoid too many
>   nodes becoming our IPs over time (more on this below).
> 

We should consider profiling the affect of an IP circuit on the network.
Granted, we shouldn't waste any unnecessary bandwidth on useless
connections, but I wonder how much load is really added.

> ==What's the lifetime of an IP?==
> 
>   Another hard question: How long should we keep IPs for?
>   
>   Currently, Tor keeps IPs for a random time between 18 to 24 hours [6].
>   
>   This seems like too short of a period if we actually want to protect
>   against adversarial nodes ever becoming our IPs: Consider an HS with
>   5 IPs that rotates them every 24 hours, in only two months it will
>   use 300 nodes as IPs plus the natural churn (which is not negligible
>   at all).
>   
>   With that in mind we need to look at all the possible attacks that
>   IPs could launch and decide whether they should be short-lived or
>   long-lived. For example, waldo in a related thread [7] [8] asks for
>   short-lived IPs, but recent entry guard research has shown that making
>   guards more long-lived is actually beneficial for security [9].
>   
>   I'm personally leaning towards more long-lived IPs but I still don't
>   know what our constants should be. I could see anything from a week,
>   to a month, to 5 months as reasonable IP lifetimes.

The current period does seem to be too short. It's not as bad as the
guard situation, so I don't think we need to keep them for multiple
months.  Something we could do is if we are still happy with an IP
after the specified time period, we can generate a new service key and
establish a new circuit with the same IP, and reuse it for one more
period. We'd need a sufficiently random gap between destroying the IP
circuit and recreating it with the new service key, so that would need
some more investigation.

>   
>   We also need to look at INTRO_POINT_LIFETIME_INTRODUCTIONS, since
>   apparently in the current code, IPs will expire on their own if they
>   perform more than 16384 introductions.
> 

That seems like a magical number, I think we need to decide which
attacks we are mitigating by counting this. Plus, as it currently
stands, this will expire an IP if a HS receives 16K introductions from
an IP within a max of 24 hours. This almost seems like a "Wow, we
received a lot of client connections from this IP within a short
period of time. We'd probably be stupid not to move to a new IP." Maybe
there was other justification though :)

> ==Conclusion==
> 
>   I hope that this thread serves as a good start on discussing
>   Introduction Point security. After we take some decisions, we will
>   need to write them down as a proposal and incorporate them in
>   rend-spec-ng.txt.
>   

Thanks for writing this.

> 
> References:
> 
> [0]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/224-rend-spec-ng.txt
> 
> [2]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/blob/ab3d5c049032651a9c9164262f9a8f81de9709d4:/src/or/rendservice.c#l1001
> 
> [3]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8950
> 
> [6]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/blob/bb68c731b897a967a4b7eb138728fa077617646e:/src/or/rendservice.c#l2998
>      https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/blob/bb68c731b897a967a4b7eb138728fa077617646e:/src/or/or.h#l4794
> 
> [7]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-May/006815.html
> 
> [8]: waldo also mentions an IP guard discovery attack in another reply of his:
>      https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-May/006843.html
> 
>      However, I'm not sure if it's actually doable, since I think that
>      HSes will discard an IP that has failed a circuit. We need to
>      look into this more seriously.
>      
> [9]: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/improving-tors-anonymity-changing-guard-parameters
> 
> [10]:https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-October/005615.html
>      https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-October/005683.html