[tor-dev] Hidden Service authorization UI

[Griffin Boyce]

So most of my work over the next three days is writing and editing documentation on hidden services. 

I'm in Boston and the purpose of this trip is to rewrite existing documentation to be more useful, but with authenticated hidden services, what's available is extremely sparse. GlobaLeaks and SecureDrop have good authenticated hidden service setups (and good use cases for them). A friend of mine uses an authenticated HS for his personal cloud.  More secure for him than logging into DropBox, etc. So they're also useful for mere mortals like us. ;-) 

Is there something you need/want in terms of documentation.

best,
Griffin

PS: yes I'm aware of the hilarious timing of this trip.


On November 9, 2014 7:50:00 AM EST, George Kadianakis <desnacked at riseup.net> wrote:
>Hidden Service authorization is a pretty obscure feature of HSes, that
>can be quite useful for small-to-medium HSes.
>
>Basically, it allows client access control during the introduction
>step. If the client doesn't prove itself, the Hidden Service will not
>poroceed to the rendezvous step.
>
>This allows HS operators to block access in a lower level than the
>application-layer. It also prevents guard discovery attacks since the
>HS will not show up in the rendezvous. It's also a way for current
>HSes to hide their address and list of IPs from the HSDirs (we get
>this for free in rend-spec-ng.txt).
>
>In the current HS implementation there are two ways to do
>authorization:
>https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/rend-spec.txt#l768
>both have different threat models.
>
>In the future "Next Generation Hidden Services" specification there
>are again two ways to do authorization:
>https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/224-rend-spec-ng.txt#l1446
>One way is with a password and the other is with a public key.
>
>I suspect that HS authorization is very rare in the current network,
>and if we believe it's a useful tool, it might be worthwhile to make
>it more useable by people.
>
>For example, it would be interesting if TBB would allow people to
>input a password/pubkey upon visiting a protected HS. Protected HSes
>can be recognized by looking at the "authentication-required" field of
>the HS descriptor. Typing your password on the browser is much more
>useable than editing a config file.
>
>Furthermore on the server-side, like meejah recently suggested [0], it
>would be nice if there was a way for HSes to be able to dynamically
>add/remove authorized clients using the control port.
>
>[0]:
>https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-October/007693.html
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